Once upon a time, in a land far, far removed from our own, there were only drunken face-to-face conversations. Then came drunk phone calls, and then things escalated from there: Drunk texting, drunk Tweeting and drunk Facebooking have all become common sources of shocked embarrassment the morning after.
The fact that social networking has become a platform for expressing our inebriated voices is disturbing. What’s more disturbing is that we’ve allowed it to become a cultural phenomenon.
You’d be hard pressed to find a college student — or high school or middle school student, for that matter — who has not heard of (and downloaded the iPhone app for) Texts From Last Night, a website that posts funny drunk texts submitted by users, complete with ratings and comments. While hilarious, the website (and book that followed) glorifies the poor decision-making that goes hand-in-hand with alcohol.
The increasing prevalence of smartphones has only made it easier for us to humiliate ourselves. Constant Internet access means drunk Facebook statuses, wall posts and chatting, drunk tweets and even drunk e-mails (likely the least common because e-mail is so, like, 2003). Ours is a culture that is obsessed with sharing our lives through social networking — and ours is a generation that is drunk on it.
This trend has reached epidemic proportions, as evidenced by The Social Media Sobriety Test, a free Firefox extension. The Test allows users to pick their social networking websites of choice and complete simple tasks (like dragging the cursor in a straight line) in order to gain access to their own accounts.
Upon visiting SocialMediaSobrietyTest.com, one is greeted with the warning “Nothing good happens online after 1 a.m.” On the right hand side of the page, there is a Twitter feed with the title “Avoidable Posts From Last Night,” which displays a stream of blatantly drunken tweets (though when they were posted and whether they are real is unclear).
On the one hand, we are acknowledging our little alcohol/Internet problem. On the other hand, we are trusting a computer’s judgment over our own. Webroot, the company that makes The Social Network Sobriety Test, “believes in protecting you in every aspect of your life.”
Remember the days when computer security systems protected us from hackers and viruses? Now, they’re protecting us from ourselves. We’ve decided that social networking under the influence is a problem outside our control, so we’re asking someone else to fix it for us. This won’t eradicate drunk Facebook statuses — we’re experts at circumventing the system. If we’re drunk and have something we want to say, we will find a way to say it.
The first step is admitting it. “Hi, my name is __________, and I am a drunk social networker.” Then, instead of relying on a computer application, take the steps to break the addiction on your own terms — for good.