These days I'm having a difficult time understanding why some girls go out. Many claim that they go out for a "fun night out with the gurlzz." Some may say that the mission of each night is to find the most adorable boy at the bar and take him home so that there's something to gossip about the next morning over a Starbucks French Vanilla Soy Latte.
Do girls go out so that they can let go of their stresses while dancing on the classiest of classy bars, pouring liquor into mouths of boys hungry to get some that night? No. What seems to be the main reason girls go out are for the muploads.
Mupload, the widely known abbreviation for "mobile upload," has become the conqueror of most of our Facebook news-feeds. Every night at approximately 1 a.m., anyone who is mid-Facebook stalking knows that his mini-feed is about to explode with phone images of girls who just have to share their every movement with the rest of the world.
Most captions of these infamous muploads include some sort of typo, so that all of the Facebook stalkers are aware that whatever is happening in the image is most definitely not happening sober. Captions such as, "she woulkkd" and "bestfriendzzzomggg," are there to show the entire online community that you have a life and that there's nowhere you'd rather be other than out and wasted.
Do girls do certain things just for the picture? Has our society begun to base its actions on whether or not the action will be recorded and then posted for the world to see? Would the girl dancing on the bar alone have gotten up on that bar if there hadn't been a Blackberry around to take a snapshot of it? Is anything we do anymore real, or is the cause behind our actions to create an image that we want people to believe?
Once these wild party animals wake up and realize that they "don't remember" their night, they refer to Facebook to find out exactly where they were, who they were with, and what they did.
"What do you mean I went to UHots?! How many times did I tell you to keep me away from there!" is the most common "morning after" statement (as if anyone really doesn't remember ordering that grilled cheese and french fries).
Even better, the muploads bring popularity as the muploader's notifications begin to soar and the image receives "likes" and comments. Through it all, the girls in the photos and the one behind the camera pretend like they're too cool to care that their image is receiving publicity, and they act as if their poses and funny moments come naturally and the camera just happened to be there at the perfect time to capture a friend falling or a couple making out.
We can't forget the embarrassing muploads of old pictures lying around our friends' houses from the third grade. These days, it's impossible to find a teenage girl who would be willing to let her friend's humiliating opportunity go un-captured or un-muploaded.
We've been sucked into a world where we willingly make our private lives public and we attack every chance we get to prove to the world that we're cool, having fun, and living our lives in the fast lane – via muploads.
Email: kerenbar@buffalo.edu
