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Social Media Summer, or Do People Still Get Thrown Into Pools?

I have to ask a stupid question, as it’s been a while since my last pool party: Do people still get thrown into pools these days?

The reason I ask is I was with a friend the other night (at a restaurant, not a pool) and as she was gesticulating with her hands, the cell phone she’d been holding slipped out and went *plunk* right into her beverage.

With the casual ubiquity of mobile social technology, I’m thinking of the danger that any given body of water poses for the hundreds of dollars of electronics — cell phones, iPods, iPhones, digital cameras, BlackBerrys, etc — that we carry in our pockets or on our persons. (Especially at social functions.)

All this means that, what could once be written off as high-spirited wacky hijinks at the pool and some temporarily wet clothes, can now mean hundreds of bucks of hardware replacement costs, plus data loss and the existential angst of being cut off from your online life and the hive mind.

(Back in my day, when all we had to worry about was artfully-feathered hair and a digital watch, there was usually a 10-minute grace period after arrival at a pool party before you were subject to tossing. Nothing is foolproof, of course: There’s a story from last year involving a pool and a bunch of high-spirited Pro Bowlers — they remembered to save the cell phone, but forgot about the diabetic tossee’s portable glucose monitor. Whoops.)

Anyway, here are some other impacts of social media on the summer pool party:

* Obviously, the use of social invitations by hosts has made events planning and coordination both easier, and more complicated, because of the devaluation of the public RSVP, accompanied by the often-nuanced calculations done by attendees as they juggle competing social obligations, in light of public guest lists and socially-broadcast status.

On the plus side, I’ve noticed over the years that the food and drink that guests brings to parties (especially barbecues) has gotten better. It could be just an artifact of all of us becoming better cooks as we’ve gotten older, but I think there’s also a factor of not wanting to look like a skinflint at a party — social shaming via passive peer pressure from public lists of attendee contributions.

* Fewer people actually getting into the pool, due to the effects of gravity, previous good eating, and the formidable socially-broadcast swimsuit factor — specifically, the “not wanting to see/be seen by co-workers with jiggly and/or pointy bits showing”, which is pretty self-explanatory for most of us.

Of course, this problem applies to pool parties from the beginning of time, but at least the psychic damage back then was limited to those present. Now, with the ease of labeling, sharing, and publishing photos on Facebook, combined with most people’s inability to really “get” granular privacy controls, we may find pause, with an urgency that’s more pronounced than at your standard social function where you aren’t already half-naked.

At least, until the first couple of drinks kick in.

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Have you seen the effects of social media on any given pool party? Do people still get thrown into pools in our gizmo-laden age? Please leave a comment below.

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