This month, NekNominations were probably the bulk of what was in your Facebook newsfeed.
The drinking game asked people to chug a pint in the funniest, weirdest way they could think of.
For the most part, the game, which seems to be on the out already, was harmless fun. But like anything involving alcohol, the Internet, and video cameras, some people took it too far.
After two Irish men died while filming their NekNominations, media across the globe caught wind of the game and suddenly the headlines read doom for our world’s social media obsessed, vulnerable youth.
Parents, police, college deans, and every other authority figure you can imagine started crying in newspaper articles about the “dangerous” fun the kids they nest over were having.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Kids do something involving alcohol, the Internet hears about it, and baby boomers cry apocalypse. It’s as reliable a formula as the Pythagorean theorem at this point.
I can remember parents freaking out about stuff like this since “sex bracelets” became a fashion item of choice when I was in Grade 7.
No one was actually using the jelly bracelets for their apparently assigned purpose of indicating what naughty activities the wearer was willing to partake in, but leave it up to our parents and teachers to assume we were getting into all kinds of trouble.
I’m sure they were doing the same thing long before the days of sex bracelets, drinking hand sanitizer, and the dumbest, probably non-existent, dangerous youth trend of all time—butt-chugging.
At the end of the day, NekNominations are kind of silly, as is anything asking someone to chug booze in one sitting whilst longboarding in high heels and wearing a Barack Obama mask.
But they really are just fun. When done right, they can be really funny and entertaining. They’ve even inspired a Canada-wide random act of kindness movement, so could they really be all that bad?
Certainly the deaths of two people are not to be taken lightly at all, but do police, parents, the media, school officials, priests, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else need to be weighing in about how dangerous the newest youth craze could potentially be? Probably not.
