Is the fear of unintentionally going viral changing clubbing for Gen Z?

Student Freya Price will be on a night out with her friends, but she cannot truly relax.

The 21-year-old is "hyper aware" while in nightclubs - avoiding promoters' cameras and watching for strangers filming - fully aware that any embarrassing moments could end up as content.

Freya said feeling monitored had cheated her out of the carefree night life Millennials enjoyed growing up.

While, for previous generations, embarrassing moments may have been talked about or uploaded to a blurry Facebook album, now they can be filmed, shared and viewed by thousands within hours.

Neuroscientist and author Dean Burnett said more people were "more anxious about doing something which could be seen as embarrassing online".

Freya said she wished she could feel comfortable dancing, being silly and enjoying the moment, but the thought of seeing videos of herself was "quite a big worry".

The third year Cardiff University student said she and her friends had often been minding their own business when "all of a sudden there's a camera in your face" as club promoters try to capture content.

On top of that, the fear of being caught in someone's TikTok plays on her mind.

She said some of her friends had appeared on club Instagram pages a week later looking "plastered".

She described this as a background worry that leaves her "on edge".

Freya is also worried about Meta glasses, having seen videos on social media of women after nights out without them being aware, as it is hard to tell between them and typical glasses.

"I find it quite scary how easy it's becoming to film people and post them on social media without them even knowing there's a camera."

Freya said she liked the idea of a sticker being put over the camera, as clubs in Berlin have done.

Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesman, told the BBC people should behave responsibly with any technology and the company had teams "dedicated to limiting and combating misuse, but as with any technology, the onus is ultimately on individual people to not actively exploit it".

"Usually, when you're drunk your inhibitions are lowered, you're not really thinking but then it's like, 'oh, there's a camera here'," she said.

"I see on social media the '90s babies saying 'Gen Z is unlucky, in my time there was no phone, the worst thing that would happen is your picture would end up in someone's Facebook dump'."

She said for her generation, a drunk night out where something goes wrong "could impact jobs in the future" as, if online checks brought up videos of "you being paralytically drunk, they might not want that image".

Feeling embarrassed is a natural human response, but social media has altered how big the audience watching the moment is, said Burnett.

The honorary research fellow at Cardiff University said he was not surprised that young people who grew up in an environment where your actions end up online have altered behaviour.

He believes social media can be positive as it helps people find a community, but "I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for everyone to have an audience".

"I do think that's become part of a lot of people's thinking, what are my followers going to think?"

He said a lot more people were "more anxious about doing something which could be seen as embarrassing online" while, on the other end of the spectrum, there were those who "do extreme things for likes and clicks".

The 43-year-old said: "A lot of people my age and older say 'I'm lucky I didn't have social media when I was younger because I got up to embarrassing things', but they assume they would have done the exactly the same things if they were on social media."

Burnett said, psychologically, it is unlikely these people would behave as they did in their youth if they had social media where their actions could be preserved.

Embarrassment, he added, is an evolutionary feature unique to humans.

"People say it's shallow to want people to like you, but in the first humans it was literally a matter of life or death. If you weren't part of the tribe, you died."

This year was 19-year-old Hafwen Davies' first year at Cardiff University and she said seeing people "taking videos on Snapchat and stuff of other people or taking photos of themselves" was a lot more obvious in the students' union.

As the youngest in her family, her siblings and cousins told her about their experience, making friends on the dance floor and the huge photo dumps on Facebook.

"When they're taking photos it's like they are taking them to remember something, rather than going out to take photos," she said.

For Edward Gent, being filmed or photographed did not even cross his mind when he was started university four years ago.

The 23-year-old said there was now an "ambient awareness that anybody could be filming" when out clubbing and felt it could "subconsciously change your behaviour without you even realising it".

He has seen the classic early 2000s photo dumps on Facebook and thinks "people are romanticising the anonymity of it, as much as the aesthetic".

"I think those blurry photos were almost as like a symbol of like 'we were present, we weren't performing'. Nobody was curating their night as such, and I think there's like a real hunger for that now."

Someone who has seen the dancefloor evolve is DJ Kaptin Barrett, 49, who has been getting people out of their seats across the UK since 1999.

He said people still dance at his nights, but he has noticed from events he has attended that club vibes have changed since his 20s.

"In terms of people just really letting loose on the dance floor, you don't see it as much, it does happen, but people are a lot more self conscious," he said.

"The attention span as well, it's hard for people not to stare at their phone every five minutes."

He said raves and free parties still happen and "there is still a generation of youngsters who don't care, they actively are pushing away from that".

"If you go to a more mainstream, big name DJ, it's really hard to just lose yourself in dance because everyone's on their phones and everyone's filming the DJ, it's the same with a lot of concerts as well.

"The mystique of the club is gone. It's just somewhere where you go and either you go to dance or you go to be seen."

Certainly for Freya, clubs have lost their appeal and she and her friends are choosing pubs instead.

"I think it's a lot more social because you can actually hear each other, no-one's on their phone.

"At the pub, you're more likely to like engage in conversation and not worry about taking pictures on your phone or video your friend being silly."