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I'm a few years older than you, but beyond the internet, I think the problem started with cell phones. First, because they enable much easier communication, and second, because they became status symbols. While ease of communication seems like a good thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of making it easier to flake. If I call you tonight and we make plans to do something right after work tomorrow, unless you change your mind within the next few hours, you're pretty much stuck. Obviously, if there's some kind of emergency you could call me at work or at the place where we're supposed to meet, but that's intrusive and inconvenient (especially if you have to find the phone number of a business without the convenience of the internet), reserved for situations where you truly can't make it. These days, if it's getting late in the day tomorrow and you feel too tired to do anything, you can always just send me a text cancelling. I'm always available, and you don't even have to talk to me directly.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but it also makes it much easier to be late for things. If I have the kind of appointment like a job interview or court appearance where it's imperative that I be on time, I'm almost never late unless I make a fundamental miscalculation or there are unforseen circumstances. But if the engagement is merely social or recreational, I'm horrible at it, not because of unforseen circumstances, but because of inertia. After all, if I say I'm going to meet friends to ski at 9 am and I'm running a half hour late, I'll just text them to start without me and I'll call to see where they're at when I'm ready. In the old days, they'd have to wait around for me in the parking lot, not knowing where I was, and they couldn't go on ahead of me because I'd have no way of finding them once I got there. Being late meant either getting them pissed off waiting or running the risk of being ditched for the day.
Whether or not this is a net negative is hard to say. People flaking is annoying but it's nowhere near as bad as people having medical emergencies and no way to call an ambulance. Hell, it's probably better than the old days when people would have to cancel for legitimate reasons but had no way of contacting you and just stood you up. It's better than being stuck at home waiting for a call, or needing to get in touch with someone who isn't home at the time. As much as people complain about people being slaves to their phones now, it was worse in the old days. If you were at home and your phone rang, you basically had to answer it. Sure, you could screen calls through your answering machine, but this was inconvenient, and the idea of doing this for every call, all the time, was absurd. So you basically had to answer the phone, and the person on the other end could be anybody, wanting to talk about anything.
To get back to the social aspect, say I'm having people over this Friday night and I'm calling friends to invite them. These days you'd send a text. The recipients can see the group text, check their schedules, and respond at their convenience. If they don't really want to commit but want to keep it as a contingency, they can wait a few days to see if anything better comes up before responding. In the old days, you'd call your friends, and they'd have to give an answer immediately. "I don't know" was an acceptable response, but one only given in the event that there was some legitimate contingency involved that prevented you from committing in the here and now but wasn't certain enough to entirely preclude your attendance. And giving such a response required you to take the additional step of calling the host back at a later date to give a firm answer.
Which brings me to my second point, about phones being status symbols. This, admittedly, isn't that much of a problem, but it ties into everything else. Cell phones were always status symbols, but originally they were status symbols of a different type. Owning a cell phone before about 1995 meant that you had a very important job where people always needed to be able to reach you and it was worth paying ridiculously high fees for this capability. Then the cost of the phones and the basic subscription came down enough that normal people could afford to have them, but the per-minute charges were expensive enough that most of these were only used for emergencies or other situations where they were the only option. Landlines still ruled the roost for everyday conversations.
Then, in the early 2000s, changes were made to the business model that made teenagers actually want to own them as opposed to having them so they could call their parents for a ride. First, plans became available that came with a certain number of minutes that could be used during the day, and unlimited minutes on nights and weekends. Eventually, unlimited talk became the standard. Now, they could be used for casual conversation without your parents getting a huge bill. Second, texting became available, quickly gaining market share for low-priority communications that weren't worth interrupting somebody over. If I called for the specific point of telling you that the Penguins' goaltending looked especially shitty tonight (and not as an entree to a longer conversation), you'd be annoyed. If I texted the same you wouldn't care. The ability to have short, inane conversations (in an era with a telephonic keypad) didn't appeal much to adults, but kids loved it.
And with more kids having cell phones, marketers realized there was room for improvement of the phones themselves. Progress in cell phone design was initially centered around making them more compact. Now it was about making them more stylish. This is where Apple really knocked it out of the park. The Blackberry had existed for years, and provided much of the same functionality as smartphones would. But they were only appealing to people who actually needed the functionality. Nobody bought a Blackberry as a status symbol, and people who needed them for work didn't seem to like using them (one friend of mine who bought one for work purposes was thrilled when her job started paying for a work phone because she could now carry a normal phone for personal use). The iPhone had improved functionality, for sure, but it was a status symbol more than anything.
This only gets truer as time goes on. The first iPhone was a huge leap forward, but subsequent iterations have been less revolutionary than the improvements to the flip phones before them. Every couple years we'd at least get a new, useful feature, like a camera, or a full keyboard. Smartphone improvements are basically limited to incremental improvements of technology that already existed in flip phones or the first generation of smartphones. Faster processor, better camera, waterproof, etc. But new iPhones don't really do anything that the originals didn't, and that statement is even less true when comparing the current generation to the previous. (The biggest selling point of the iPhone 16 is that it has native AI capability, which sounds good until you consider that any phone with access to the internet has AI capability, just not on the phone itself. I don't know who this is supposed to appeal to.)
Nonetheless, there are people who want this thing. Every time a new iPhone comes out, there's a line out the door at the Apple Store of people who can't even wait a couple of weeks. Contrast this to the 90s. Phones were appliances. My parents had the same wall phone hanging in the kitchen throughout my entire childhood and most of my adulthood. You only got a new phone if the old one broke or, rarely, if there was some game-changing feature like a cordless handset or touch-tone dialing that you wanted. The idea of getting a new phone every two years was like the idea of getting a new dryer every two years.
The importance of this to the current phenomenon relates back to the first reason. Even though phones seem more central to our lives now, they are actually less central than they were 30 years ago. Like I said, if the phone rang, chances are you answered it, even though you probably had no idea who it was or what the call was about. If you made plans over the phone, you were stuck with them, unless you went to great lengths. If an important call came and you weren't home, you were out of luck. Our entire lives revolved around telephones and having access to telephones, but nobody really noticed or cared. They were as exciting as vacuum cleaners. Now they're as sexy as ever even though the core functionality hasn't improved since the introduction of texting. Once the average person was liberated from the noose of the telephone, that should have been the end of it, and progress should have stopped. The smartphone's integration of communication equipment with a portable, but unimprovably limited, personal computer, should have been the last improvement anybody cared about. But here we are, 15 years later, and people are even more concerned now than they were then.
Yeah, I think your whole first section makes sense when you include the whole "devaluation of relationships" aspect.
THAT'S the part that makes it so easy to be flaky. If you truly value the relationship with your friends, you make an effort to be at the event as planned, because even if its easy to cancel last minute, you know that this will eventually lose you status points (you'd lose more in the older days where people would be stuck waiting for you and get pissed) and people will stop inviting you at all, eventually leaving you out of everything.
This is bad if its hard to find new friends OR there aren't many things to do by yourself. But guess what? You can make friends online! You can pay an Onlyfans girl to talk to you while you sit at home! You can watch a streamer and PRETEND he's your friend!
If you REALLY fuck up and gain a bad reputation throughout your town, its relatively easy to move to a new town and make new friends quickly.
I have to imagine that 'ghosting' dates was simply NOT a common practice before dating apps, for similar reasons. You really needed to keep your appointments because the pool of potential dates was relatively small and so if you offended too many you might be locked out of dating altogether. Instead, of course, you ghost one match because you can always go back to swiping with zero penalty.
So now it is easier to be flakey without wrecking your social status, AND its easier to move on if you do wreck the status.
And that flips over to your arguments that phones are now status symbols. Which man, I hadn't thought deeply on that and there's something to unpack there.
For me, I place an insanely high value on maintaining relationships, so I have inbuilt incentive to honor my commitments once made, and I thus hate hate hate feeling like my personal relationships have been devalued. But the world is how it is. I just put in the effort to maintain the friendships I really care about.
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