Viral craze continues to spread, people continue to die
With the death of two young men in the United Kingdom being cited as the third and fourth fatality associated with the online drinking sensation, “Neknomination,” it seems that despite the media’s best efforts to scare people into stopping, no one is yet quite scared enough.
Twenty-year-old Isaac Richardson, who died in the early hours of Sunday, Feb. 9, is said to have collapsed and died after downing more than a pint of lager, white wine, whiskey, and vodka, all mixed together. Twenty-nine year old Stephen Brooks died in a similar fashion after trying to finish a whole pint of vodka while out with friends. These aren’t the first deaths to be linked to the new viral craze, with two young Irish men having died in the last week, following their own attempts at outdoing the competition.
What began as a simple ‘chug your beer and pass it on’ concept has evolved drastically in a few short weeks, as the trend has spread like wildfire across the Internet. Now, in order to stay relevant, people are having to come up with new, improved, and often more disgusting ways in which to one up their friends. Some of the more horrible ingredients in the cocktails include raw eggs and human urine, while often times the drinking aspect is combined with some sort of stunt – the more dangerous or disgusting the stunt, the more impressive the video. Some notable stunts include a man skateboarding down the highway while funneling a beer, a woman stripping down to lingerie in a busy store, and a man biting the head off of a chicken.
The media’s sensationalizing aside, the idea of Neknomination is essentially that, upon nomination, one must ‘neck’ their drink (initially beer, but has progressed to more extreme cocktails as the chain continues) and then elect several friends to do the same within a 24-hour period. Essentially, all that has happened is that a time honoured tradition of challenging one’s friends to a ‘chugging’ competition has been taken and retooled for survival in the realm of social media.
This is not a new concept, just a new look for an old game that has been going on for generations. However, the idea of committing something like this to social media, where absolutely anyone can access and watch it (and will be able to do so for the foreseeable future), is irresponsible. The main problem with the rise of social media in society is that there is virtually no privacy anymore. Every single person we engage with on a day-to-day basis is essentially carrying a good camera with them at all times. Therefore, all our exploits, both altruistic and hedonistic, can be recorded and posted somewhere on the Internet.
Combine this with the dangerous exploits undertaken by those lucky “Neknominees,” and peer pressure, and this has developed a cocktail for disaster.
It is worth restating that this trend is far from new – people have been challenging each other to drinking competitions for a long, long time. However, moving those competitions out of basements and backyards and into moving cars other unsafe places forfeits the small measure of security society might have had. Sure, passing out at a friends house and waking up with marker all over your face (and said face all over Facebook) is never much fun, but it beats not waking up at all.