Facebooked Part I: I'm Being Stalked, But Everybody Seems Okay With This...

It's a very interesting concept, this Facebook thing. As a sociology student, Facebook provides a cornucopia of avenues for social research and insight into the patterns of human interaction and virtual identity. The best part is, it's all in the same place and accessible to everyone all the time. Though I could dedicate a my life to the study of Facebook, I'll only address it as it individually applies to me.

Recently, I have spent some time thinking about the well known and probably overused term "Facebook Stalking". Users of Facebook say this when they want to justify browsing through some body's profile looking for revealing pictures or try to get a pulse on somebody's life. Generally, the positive thing about Facebook over Myspace is that you have to be friends with the person before you can learn their juicy details and look at their bikini pictures. This has granted users a variable sense of security knowing that only people they allow can "stalk" them.

Of course, now we know who's looking because they ask to add us as friends.

I used to not be selective when I received Facebook friend invites. Generally, they were people at my university and since we were all freshman and sophomores, we were "friending" all the people that we could to keep our fingers on the pulse of the campus community. Granted, this has led to a post-graduation, "who is this" which often tempts me to go through and "de-friend" people, although I currently do not have the balls to do this do to my perceived social consequences of sed act (maybe a later "Facebooked" entry?).

As more schools joined Facebook (you used to have to have a school e-mail to join...) and then eventually, the general public was allowed to join (enter pre-pubescent Myspacers with mirror self-portraits) Facebook became a walk down memory lane. People would search by their old high schools and find a slew of people scattered across the country. Through a social chain of events, people you knew in grade school suddenly became your Facebook friends.

When professors in college started using Facebook as a means of communication, this was generally okay. Students have a hard time envisioning that their profs might have social lives, and Facebook helped to reiterate, and sometimes disprove that fact (popular teachers are obviously more cyber-relevant).

I was suddenly stunned when a former high school teacher asked me to be his Facebook friend. I wasn't necessarily stunned that it was THIS particular teacher, although that in-it-of-itself was intriguing. What startled me was that this older gentleman was using Facebook to friend former students and even more creepy, current ones. What is a high school teacher going to do with the ability to "Facebook stalk" the overtly attractive and readily-illegally seductive girls at this private high school in Orange County? Does this strike anybody as being inappropriate? I'm not suggesting that teachers who friend students are predatory. But in high school, this seems a little too potentially hazardous, and maybe some of this is because I know this man can be a little "too close for comfort" sometimes.

I denied this man's friendship. I don't want to be on his Facebook page when he gets subpoenaed. More importantly, I don't want to be part of any potential indulgence in a social fantasy as created and manipulated by Facebook. For this reason, I have closed my doors to mass Facebook immigration. Somewhere Facebooker's have to draw the same line. Who am I going to allow access to my photos and info? Though parents are cool online, and some college profs, high school teachers with a primary friend list of students doesn't seem like a safe move.

Unfortunately, we're comfortable being stalked to some degree now. More disastrously, we're comfortable volunteering information to friends we hardly know anymore and or we haven't spoken to since youth. The more that Facebook becomes popular, the more prone it becomes to become predatory (like Myspace) for older people to "stalk" younger people through the elimination of social boundaries through online globalization. Perhaps the only redeemable element is that on Facebook, we choose our friends and the public does not have access to our info and pictures. If this eventually changes, than Facebook becomes a place for 13 year olds to create 18 year old virtual identities and post submissive self-portraits for clandestine social consumption.

Who’s looking at your info? Your vacation pictures? Your relationships? I think the reality is that we don’t know. But the worse reality is that we don’t care…