Instagram. Pictures and videos. Showing off and looking at. 

Some people use Instagram to follow celebrities, others to curate their lives. Some find creative inspiration from particular feeds or hashtags. Others find confirmation of their opinions and tastes by looking at similar opinions and tastes on display.

I enjoy Instagram for several reasons, and one of them is to laugh. Among the funnier IG accounts I follow (thanks to my teenagers) is "Drunk People Doing Things". If you scroll through this account, you'll find lots of videos of people (mostly young, mostly white, various genders) doing a variety of stupid things while drunk. They fall, they break things, they shove food into their mouths, they act boorish in many ways. 

They smash beer cans into their foreheads and then drink the spraying liquid. They try to pole-vault over items and inevitably collapse on the ground. They try to open bottles of champagne and break them. They flame out while on Slip-N-Slides and crash into tables. They wobble along sidewalks, grab onto other people and flop down, try to feed wild animals and get bitten, dance sloppily on ping pong tables, barf into toilets, try gymnastic routines but fail, drop their phones into toilets, take rides in shopping carts, and other foolish actions.

Are these people performing for the camera, or blithely unaware of their daring-do? Are they proud of their idiocy, or do they regret their actions and hope future employers never take note of their shenanigans? The answer is all of the above.

Drunk people doing (stupid, dangerous, sloppy) things is not a new phenomenon. Laughing at (or with) the guilty parties is nothing new either. But social media takes sharing and blaring the ridiculous behavior to a deeper level so that it has more far-reaching audiences and consequences. 

You could chalk up much of this to the folly of youth, and most of the posted videos and photographs do feature teens and young adults. But just about everyone realizes these days that what goes to social media can haunt you for a heck of a long time and humiliate you in multiple ways. Do you really want a video out there, with over 1.6 million views, of you drunk and licking your hand in a lascivious fashion? Do you want more than 1.7 million views of yourself holding a drink and falling into a table on a boat?

Are you people laughing AT you or WITH you? 

And why do so many of these videos feature destruction? We see doors smashed to pieces, tables broken, bottles exploded, food destroyed. And reputations, too!

Yet I laugh at these videos, and so do many other people. With a spare minute or two, you can check out this Instagram page and reap cheap, easy laughs. You can also watch Drunk People Making Out, Doing Sports, Fighting, At Coachella, of NY, from Germany, Eating, and more. 

Ultimately, what does this say about our society? Too much.