Photo by TheOnlyAnla
Sometimes, Facebook “research” gets a little out of hand
When Denise, a law student from Arizona, met Jason a few months ago at a karaoke bar, the two hit it off right away. He bought her drinks, asked her if she was dating anyone and cheered her on when she performed her offbeat rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.” After a night of endless flirting, the two exchanged business cards and made plans to meet up the following week for after-work drinks. Then Denise did what any sensible young woman does when she meets a guy. She Googled him, then searched him on Facebook and MySpace, looking for any information she could find about the man she had just met.
“If I have a guy’s name, there’s a 99 per cent chance that I will search him and try to find out as much as I can about him,” says Denise.
“Cyber-stalking” is something more and more people have access to with sites like Facebook, which has over 300 million registered users. It’s easy to see how information searching has taken a back seat to Internet voyeurism. Most people will admit to monitoring other users’ information and it’s usually pretty harmless. You log on and peruse the walls of your closest friends, view their photos and comment on last night’s outing. This is all normal behaviour and follows the unspoken rules of social networking etiquette. But what happens when you find yourself constantly checking out your ex-boyfriend’s wall, his friend’s, and his co-worker’s (the one you double-dated with that one time)? Your mind starts to wander. Soon, you’re checking out the page of your ex-boyfriend’s new flame daily. An innocent and curious peek becomes a full-blown obsession. You wonder what they have in common and more importantly, what’s their status?! What started out as a fun and innovative way to keep up with friends has turned you into a pathetic cyber stalker.
How accurate, let alone fair, is it to make an assessment on someone based on the information you find on their Facebook page? Unfortunately, too many people use social networking to pass judgment. Employers are catching onto this trend, using it to their advantage by checking out the profiles (read: party habits) of potential employees.
Then there are those that want to check out the current lifestyle of a past romantic partner. Sarah, a marketing assistant from New York, searched the name of her high school sweetheart after learning that he’d be attending their upcoming 10-year high school reunion. In high school, he had been a star athlete and a model student but Sarah couldn’t resist the temptation to figure out who he had become since he left high school. Sure enough, his Facebook and MySpace pages told the tale. Her former high school sweetheart had turned into quite the bachelor; the photos on his sites were full of drunken parties, marijuana memorabilia and bikini-clad coeds whom he had casually hooked up with, all on shameless display for the cyber world to see. When David saw Sarah at the reunion and mentioned meeting up for coffee to catch up, she declined, stating that she wasn’t ready to date.
A recent Canadian study reports that Facebook may also be responsible for creating jealousy and suspicion in romantic relationships. But what about those cyber-stalkers who have found valuable information thanks to their suspicions (and their social networking savvy)? Candice had been dating Rob for two years when she felt that something wasn’t right between them.
“He was distant and whenever I approached him about it, he got defensive and changed the topic,” she says. Candice suspected that Rob was cheating and after continuously denying it, she took to his Facebook page to try and figure out what was going on and with whom. “I had noticed a co-worker of his occasionally leaving comments on his wall but shrugged it off as friendly chatter. But after having my suspicions I noticed that the comments became more and more personal. They even had their own inside jokes which made me very uncomfortable.”
Candice researched a little further offline and found out Rob and his co-worker had more than a work-related relationship. She broke up with immediately. “If it wasn’t for the conversations they had back and forth on Facebook, I would have dismissed the whole thing and still be in denial about his behaviour.”
So how do you tell when the line between innocent voyeurism and freaky stalker has been crossed? For Meghan, an acting student from California, it’s not so easy to tell. Meghan was recently at a friend’s dinner party when she was introduced to Craig through a mutual friend. They exchanged some small talk and Meghan got to talking about a recent photo shoot she had. As she continued talking about her photo shoot, Craig interrupted her and complimented her on the way she posed in the photos. Confused and a bit concerned, Meghan asked Craig how he knew about it, to which he responded:
“I saw them all over Facebook!”
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