Last weekend, you may have stumbled upon a video featuring a group of sorority girls at a baseball game, ignoring the goings on and taking a bunch of selfies like the self-absorbed narcissists all millennials are. And the game announcers were right there to call them out for being the worst generation ever.
And if you didn’t stumble across it, I have it here for you to stumble to now!
Oh man, aren’t those girls stupid! They’re too concerned with making faces to pay attention to the world around them! That was the common response anyway, the joke everyone was supposed to laugh at. But it’s wrong. While it’s amusing that so many people were taking selfies at the same time, I really don’t see why they’re the ones who are the butt of the joke. Especially when every single person I’ve seen make fun of them has themselves taken a selfie at some event or another. YEAH I’M LOOKING AT YOU.
Really, the joke should be on the game of baseball itself. Specifically, how goddamn boring the game is that you can keep cutting to a group of girls taking pictures to make fun of them and not miss any action. Yeah, those girls are so dumb ignoring the game to take pics, but ignoring the game to talk about them is a worthwhile endeavor. Did you know that the average game of baseball only has about 18 minutes of actual gameplay? There’s a lot of downtime, so why not let them take pictures?
Or the joke could be the “jokes” the commentators were attempting to make. Though they didn’t come across as jokes so much as admissions that they are your grandfather sitting on the porch yelling at the kids these days.
“I can’t even get my phone to take pictures.” That’s sad. It’s literally just pushing a button. The audio equipment in your booth is more complicated than camera phones.
“Do you have to make faces when you take a picture?” I mean, I guess if you’re joyless you can stare dead-eyed into the camera. Memories! These guys come across as caricatures of the Old White Male who is incapable of understanding how anyone would think differently from them, except these are real actual people somehow.
Yes, I get that selfies have become so prevalent in today’s culture that it is itself a punchline, just like hipsters and 20-somethings who write memoirs. But in this context these girls did nothing wrong. I’ve seen plenty of guys at games absorbed in their phones looking over fantasy stats, also ignoring the game around them, and they’ve never gotten shit for it. So let’s not point and laugh at this group for having fun. It’s not their fault we picked a slow, boring-ass game as our national pastime.
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