Reunions
Why do we have reunions? The Yale Symphony had its first-ever reunion this past weekend, and I have some suggested answers to this question.
We have reunions to celebrate getting older rather than to return to our youth. It was great to see the current instantiation of the orchestra — there are wonderful players in the group — but I don't think that those of us who were distant from our college years (compared to, say, the class of '02) wanted to be that age again. We were having too much fun ignoring the current occupants and talking to the other alumni.
There are exceptions to this celebration, of course; it was hard to know what to say to the alum who saw pictures of himself/herself from his/her undergraduate days and said “I've gained 50 pounds since then.”
Reunions give us a chance to see places we used to see. It was great to be on the stage of Woolsey Hall again in the middle of a very loud orchestra. (Large numbers of trombone players showed up from the alumni ranks.) I remembered the view out the windows and how uncomfortable the hall's chairs are.
We like reunions because they take us out of our day-to-day lives briefly, reconnect us to the past, and then let us go home. Reunions are disruptive. We leave our homes and our routines to visit another life. It's space travel and time travel combined. The air is different at a reunion. We tell old stories to friends who understand us. But then it ends, mercifully, and we return to where and how we live, and all the problems/joys/deadlines of that life.
So: when has social software/social life online been sustained enough to trigger a desire for a reunion? And what do those reunions look like? I'm sure they've happened. But how do we celebrate our aging, see places we used to see, and experience the disruptiveness of a reunion online? Or does the timeless, borderless, “classless” nature of the online flow make all sessions reunions, in a sense?
Let me know.