Last week, I happened to catch a Twitter post (petulantly, I refuse to call them tweets) from fellow blogger Jill, about a local Tweetup (Twitter user meetup) in Bethesda later that evening. Although there’s a Facebook group for this particular bunch of DC Twitter users, I hadn’t known about it, so it was new to me, and a game-time decision.
I ended up going and having a good time. But it also got me thinking about how social events and event planning have changed over the years, because of technology.
Back in the mid-1990s, I was in New York, and hanging around in a virtual community centered around our local ISP. We didn’t have modern social media party planning tools like Evite or Facebook events, so when we wanted to set up a real-world get-together, we’d do it the old-fashioned way: with forum posts, chats, and e-mails.
Sometimes, we’d get to the venue and end up deciding to go somewhere else. Which was a problem — back then, cell phones weren’t nearly as common as they are now, and if you needed to catch someone on the fly, your best chance was if you had their pager number.
So, at least a few times, we ended up leaving sticky notes on the door, telling people where we’d moved on to. How we survived, I’ll never know.
Flash-forward to the present day, where we not only have great social media planning tools for appointment-based events, with all the info you could ever want (plus maps, messaging, and public attendance lists) but we also have mobile media tools to help manage those on-the-fly opportunities that pop up at the last minute.
It’s caused a generational shift in how people look at some events, where planning and preparation is replaced by ad hoc decision making and communication, in a flash mob-y kind of way.
And I’m not even talking about specialized, location-based, GPS-enabled services like Brightkite or Dodgeball or anything like that. They’re still pretty niche-y (or at least, I don’t use them). I’m thinking that, in Phase 1, social media and online community tools took event planning online (from paper invites and RSVPs); in Phase 2, cell phones, made mobile event coordination possible; and now, in Phase 3, things like group texting (straight from your cell phone or through an intermediary like Twitter) made mobile event coordination convenient (no more having to set up phone calling trees).
Anyway, though the tools have changed, the fact that people still want to socialize together, is mostly the same. Although one can argue that transparency in guest RSVP responses had lead to a change in what those responses actually mean — check out this NYT writer’s article about a party for his Facebook friends where 15 “yes” and 60 “maybe” responses resulted in one actual warm body attending.
How about you — how have social media and mobile communication tools changed the way that you plan or attend events? Is your cell phone a crutch for poor planning? Leave a comment and let us know.
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