Clubbing is one of those supposedly ubiquitous student activities along with drunken traffic cone antics, watching Neighbours and leaving all your work until the last minute, though I managed to largely avoid it. Personally, I prefer social activities where you can interact with people on a more meaningful level than bellowing over music while doing a self-conscious jiggle as an apology for not dancing. Give me an evening down the pub chatting over a drink any day.
So I was pleased to see that the entertainingly bitter Charlie Brooker shares my opinion: “Nightclubs are hell. What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?“
Mixed in with the hyperbole and cynicism, he has some sharp observations to make about the degree of self-obsession that some people display:
The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.
Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah – but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more – you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.
That’s very interesting, and plays into my thoughts on the culture of narcissism that I’m pondering at the moment. In our culture, we’re all preoccupied to a greater or lesser extent with constructing our identity, validating our existence, through an endless parade of activity and self-reflection, and that’s played out in all sorts of ways – from clubbing, to our dvd collections, to our Facebook profiles, to our choice of clothes. Brooker describes one of the ugly extremes of the culture of narcissism, but it infects us all.