"Best $2k I Ever Spent!" Anti-Social Socializing

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Last night's kickoff party at The Standard Downtown for Filter Magazine's Culture Collide Festival read like an index of anti-social behavior for the web 3.0 generation. Whether they were texting, emailing, BBMing, or Tweeting, the fact that we'd often rather engage in virtual socializing than the real thing was clear as day. And evidently such anti-social practices have broken ground in socially acceptable displays of disengagement...

Here we have at least two separate instances of texting mid-conversation.

It doesn't look as if someone was talking to her directly so she could've just been taking a Tweet break.

It's one thing to stand there and pretend you're listening while you send a quick text or email, but this guy actually has his back turned to his date.

Looks like he has given up on even attempting to hold a conversation with his texting friend tonight.

And this guy's just given up on the night altogether. He'd rather stand in a corner by himself and communicate with the Twitterverse than human beings.

They've given up on each other and are both telling their friends via BBM what a mistake it was going to the party together.

Since they're getting paid to do that, they don't count.

But these guys aren't even pretending to be sending an important email and are straight up leafing through magazines.

Girlfriend on the right is hoping he'll finish reading soon so it can be her turn to stop pretending to care what their friend is saying and he can assume the role of polite listener.