Who got fat, who got hot, and is that old crush of mine still single? Whatever happened to that weird kid with the hair? Wait, am I the one who got fat?<\/p>\n
Such are the essential questions at the core of every high school and college reunion. For decades, the routine has remained the same: a bunch of old classmates get together and catch up, settle (or renew) grievances and swap glory-days stories. Yet the ability to locate former classmates through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and, well, the Internet itself, has alumni organizations and other such groups wondering if the sun is setting on the traditionally organized reunion. (Read a TIME report: \u201cFive Facebook No-Nos for Divorcing Couples.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Take Kim Brinegar, who in 1998 helped organize the 10-year reunion for her class at Maryland\u2019s Arundel High School. \u201cBack then, the Internet wasn\u2019t really that reliable for finding people,\u201d she says. \u201cI had to rely on word of mouth, advertising in the paper and sending things to people\u2019s parents.\u201d For the 20-year reunion, however, she had a new tool: Facebook. Through the site, Brinegar was able to get in touch with tons of people she couldn\u2019t track down last time around, including an exchange student from Italy who flew across the Atlantic for the reunion last November. (See TIME\u2019s top 10 social-networking apps.)<\/p>\n
Rather than turn people off from wanting to attend (\u201cWell, smokin\u2019 hot Sally looks just awful now \u2014 no need for me to go\u201d), Facebook only increased the excitement for the 20th reunion at Massachusetts\u2019 Sharon High School, says Holly Goshin, who helped plan the event. \u201cIt\u2019s enticing. It\u2019s like a little preview, seeing everyone\u2019s life online. And whether you\u2019re happy that someone is not doing as well as you or you\u2019re happy that they look amazing, you get to see it all in person. Then you can move on with your life.\u201d<\/p>\n
But such self-organization is hurting businesses devoted to reunions, says Jonathan Miller, co-owner of Reunited Inc., a 20-year-old company that has helped plan more than 1,000 high school reunions. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely affected our business,\u201d Miller says. \u201cClasses can now easily say to me, \u2018Jonathan, we have 150 people in our Facebook group right now, and we really don\u2019t need your services.\u2019 \u201d (See 10 ways in which your job is going to change.)<\/p>\n
College-alumni associations are dealing with the same issues. \u201cStudents now are all connected through Facebook and MySpace and other sites, so they leave college with their own network completely intact,\u201d says Deborah Dietzler, executive director of alumni relations at the University of Georgia. \u201cThis is not like 20 years ago, where, if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you kind of needed to call the alumni office.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a personal level, Dietzler is a good example of how Facebook can hurt reunion attendance. \u201cThere was a Facebook page for my 20-year college reunion, which took place this May,\u201d she says. \u201cI looked at it a couple of times and it didn\u2019t seem like anyone I knew would be there, so I lost interest.\u201d (Read \u201cYour Facebook Relationship Status: It\u2019s Complicated.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Still, the idea that social-networking sites might kill reunions is a faulty one, because that would essentially mean killing nostalgia itself. While Facebook allows you to easily discover that your old pal Jack now has twins, it does not allow you to knock back a drink with Jack at your old campus dive (unless it\u2019s a virtual drink, and where\u2019s the fun in that?). What the Internet is doing is shifting power from schools to former students. There\u2019s less need for snail-mail brochures and impersonal e-mails from alumni offices and businesses like Reunited Inc. when any former student can just form a reunion group on Facebook.<\/p>\n
Marc Dizon was a class officer for Virginia\u2019s West Springfield High class of 1999. Nine or so years later, dozens of former classmates began to e-mail him via Facebook to ask if a reunion was going to happen. The interest was there. \u201cI don\u2019t think reunions are redundant on account of social media,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re always going to want to see people face to face. And those who don\u2019t go are probably those who wouldn\u2019t have gone even if there was no Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Huynh, who helped organize a reunion for his 1998 Lowell High School class in San Francisco, says the gathering \u2014 which 214 out of about 600 class members attended \u2014 might not have happened if it weren\u2019t for Facebook. \u201cIt made it very cheap for us to connect quickly with classmates and get information out to them. It was also easy to get feedback on what dates students prefer and, afterwards, on how the event went. I think that five years from now, the popularity of Facebook is going to make it an even more effective way to get people together.\u201d (Read about using Facebook and Twitter to find a job.)<\/p>\n
So reunions are probably here to stay, says Andrew Shaindlin, executive director of the Caltech Alumni Association and a blogger at Alumni Futures. But the real danger is that an end to reunions organized by alumni associations would make it more difficult for those associations to raise funds from former students. \u201cIt\u2019s going to affect donations,\u201d says Shaindlin. \u201cWe\u2019ve lost our monopoly over the data on how to communicate with schoolmates. We need to step back and figure out how to remain relevant, because there may be some point three or five or seven years from now when we\u2019re going to hold a reunion and almost nobody is going to sign up.\u201d By then, however, alumni associations may have figured out how to tap donors via Facebook. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who got fat, who got hot, and is that old crush of mine still single? Whatever happened to that weird kid with the hair? Wait, am I the one who got fat? Such are the essential questions at the core of every high school and college reunion. For decades, the routine has remained the same: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhsaas-org.net\/Rhsaas-Org-Site\/z-POSTS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nRead more: Time Article on Reunions being affected by Facebook<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n