Social Networking - Friend or Foe?

As a child of the mid-to-late 70s and 80s, and as a "late in life" baby whose parents remembered a bit farther back than most of my friends' parents, I grew up hearing about the things I was lucky enough to enjoy that they did not have. My mother told me (many times) about how she used to go home from school at lunchtime and listen to programs like Guiding Light on the radio.

This usually resulted from my sulking around the house complaining that there was nothing on tv and endless whining about wanting cable television because having 6 channels was simply unacceptable.

But the circle of life continues, and I now find myself thinking the same things about the technology that is available today. Sometimes I even long for the good ol' days when we didn't have certain things available because lately I'm finding that technology brings just as many problems as it does joys and conveniences.

As a kid, I was constantly harassed about my telephone use. I used to lay on floor in the dining room, next to the desk (which was never used for anything) because the cord on the rotary phone did not go very far, and talk to my friends. And there always seemed to be a problem about this.

"Will you keep it down?! I can hear you all over the house!"

"Get off that phone, you've been on it for 40 minutes!"

"You JUST saw her at school! Hang up!"

In them there days, ya see, we had three options to communicate with family and friends...

1) get up off your butt and go see them
2) talk on the phone (and pay for it - no free nights and weekends back in my day)
3) send a letter (a real one, with paper and a stamp and everything)

These days, we neither have to leave the house nor so much as open our mouths to see or speak to people, thanks to technology. Text messaging, email, instant message, web cameras, picture messaging and social networking sites are, in some ways, convenient and beneficial. But in so many other ways, these things can be an epic nightmare.

Sites like Facebook have many advantages. Finding old friends, keeping in touch with friends and family you don't get to see often or live far away, entertainment (I play Bejeweled and FarmVille to decompress myself after a long day!), and the ability to instantly communicate with the people in your world.


But what happens when there are people you don't want in your world? It's easy to ignore text messages and emails and privatize your social network accounts, but determined people will nearly always find a way. I've had situations where I didn't necessarily wish to chat at certain moments and later been accused of "avoiding".

"Well, I know you were online, I saw you post on Facebook...." Needy much? Chill your ass out, hometown, I was watching "A Time To Kill" on TBS and eating a blue Flav-R-Ice, not hiding in a tornado cellar waiting for you to die so I wouldn't have to talk to you. Jiminey christmas!

So that's been one of my problems with technology and easy accessibility. The stalkers.

So, the solution is easy, right? Privatize everything. It's like locking your house or car to prevent theft. Keep out those you don't want in. But just as with robbers, they will always find a way. You literally have to avoid posting anything, anywhere, at any time to avoid the nosy stalkers. "Well, if you don't want people to know what you're doing, then that's the way it is..."

Well, wrong. Why should I have to bow out of something that I wish to participate in just because some people have nothing better to do with their time or life than to snoop around at what everyone else is doing, and who is posting and at what time? As I see it, I'm not the one with the problem in this scenario.

Where is this all coming from? Well, not long ago I discovered someone I knew once upon a time stalking a friend of mine. I call it stalking because this individual is A) known for being nosy and B) does not even know my friend, and I see no reason the person in question needs to be looking at my friend's social sites to see what she's doing, or find things out about her, or whatever the reason is.

Random clicking? "Hey, what's this, looks interesting..." Sure, no problem, we all do that from time to time. But that isn't the case here.

Not long after, I found the same thing with my own social sites. I mean really... it's just pathetic. It's like the ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend stalking that people do. Ok, so we decide that we can't get along, we don't want to really be around each other, but you're going to poke around all my social sites (and lord knows what else) long after the fact to look at what I'm up to and who is in my life, and then when you see who is in my life, you're going to investigate them too?

Granted, I'm not surprised, coming as this does from a person who admitted to me many times how they were looking at this or that person's site and found out such and such, and how they were able to hack into their significant others' social sites and email accounts, etc. I found this individual not only looking in at what I'm posting (as recently as a week ago), but also looking at what my ex is up to and what he posts (and then having conversations about it behind my back - nice, right?) and what my friends are up to. It's sick.


Am I surprised? No. Do I actually care? Not really. It's disrespectful and I have one way of dealing with that level of disrespect - you're done, end of story. But those of you who know me know that psychology and human behavior is an interest of mine. I just wonder what fuels this obsessiveness? Boredom? Attention? Inability to function without constant drama encircling them? Just plain nosy as all shit? All of the above?

The other part of this that has bugged me recently is celebrity stalking. It was the same pricipal as what I just described, only the target was an out of the spotlight celeb. This past weekend, I got into a heated debate with one of these people. The long and short of that was this random obsessive person tracking a certain star all over creation via sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. By tracking I do not mean reading articles and such about said star. I mean literally messaging people who might have info, who might have seen the person at the mall or whatever, running twitter searches for any mention of the person... jumping on it right away when someone posted a status that mentioned having randomly seen this star at a public place... it's just weird. As I read the account of this, I was nauseous. What compels a person to become that hard core obsessed with a complete stranger?

I mean, I'm a fan of many celebs... I'll be at Johnny Depp's next movie in two seconds because he's a wonderful actor and I enjoy his work (and he's hot!) But I couldn't have any less interest in what shoe size he wears, what his favorite Fibonacci number is, or where he was seen having dinner last Wednesday.

I think for the most part, these types of sites are used (by the normal folk) for convenience, entertainment, communication, business and learning, but there certainly is a big downside when you get the obsessive weirdos who have nothing better to occupy themselves with, who weren't hugged enough as children or whatever the root of this particular evil happens to be. This includes spammers, hackers, virus-creators, stalkers and the like. Essentialy, these behaviors are just byproducts of boredom and lack of focus, and websites like MySpace, et al only make it easier for people like this and save them from leaving their homes and digging into your trash to see who you got a birthday card from and whether or not you still talk to your ex-wife or what your boyfriend does for a living.

Seriously, guys... go outside and sniff a flower. Observe a tree. Go to a movie. Do something constructive. Maybe wander into a psychologist's office on the way, if you happen to get a minute in between reading this blog and forwarding it on to an equally strange and dramatic friend prefaced with a message like "Do you believe what she wrote?!"