by Colleen Canty
She may as well have slinked through his bedroom window,
pried open his closet doors and lurked in its shadows, sniffing his dress
shirts and eavesdropping through the cracks.
Instead, she had orchestrated the entire operation from the
comfort of her flannel bed sheets and MacBook Pro, when mere curiosity nudged
her to first check up on her friend Sophie Vuckovich.
Bethany Siekmeier, junior liberal arts major at Colorado
State University, logged onto Facebook.
“Boom!”
And she knew she had a problem.
First, she cyber-stalked Sophie.
This then led her to check up on Sophie’s brother, Marco.
So, then she cyber-stalked him.
A few mindless minutes of scrolling through Marco's Facebook
activity led her to a recent post of his on a friend John’s wall.
So, she cyber-stalked John.
One click on his profile picture led to another thousand
through his photo albums. One glance at his friend's post led to another
hundred through his wall's history.
An hour rolled by and Siekmeier knew enough about John to
write a brief history of his life. All 30 years of it.
Siekmeier had never met John, spoke of John, nor been aware
of his existence, but after approximately 500 engagement pictures, a few
scrolls down on his wall of comments and some refined sleuthing skills, she
knew he lived in Seattle, honeymooned in Las Vegas and was moving to Denver, her
current location, to reunite with his five-year-old son, whom he endearingly
nick-named “Boom.”
Weeks later, Siekmeier realized she and John had
serendipitously found themselves at a mutual friend’s dinner party – not
because Marco introduced them or even because she recognized his face from the
copious amount of pictures she had sifted through on the Internet.
But because she heard John reprimand his son from another
room: “Boom! Stop that!”
Under the protection of a plasma screen and cyber mask, Siekmeier,
among millions of other users just like her, found herself guilty of a
transparent “crime” and a painful addiction many don't have the courage to
admit even to themselves.
Until – boom – it slaps them in the face.
Siekmeier was a grade A Facebook stalker.
Technopedia.com, a web page dedicated to IT professionals,
defines Facebook stalking as “the use of Facebook to follow the online actions
of another Facebook user.” According to a recent poll by the Dow
Jones-partnered Statista website, 62 percent of young adults identify Facebook
as a major facilitator of their own actions stalking others, actions ranging
from checking someone’s updated status several times a day to 24/7
surveillance.
Siekmeier is certain she isn't even as bad as they come –
she labeled her online habits as “average” and “pretty normal” for a young
college student like herself. She can name several friends who have skills
honed enough to dig up a cute boy's profile from class in mere minutes on
Facebook using merely their first name and where they go to school, thanks to
the advanced search filters recently constructed by the website.
These include options to find results based on name, city of
residence, city of origin, school attending or even line of work.
While the term “stalking” may conjure images of middle-aged
men – sporting wife beaters to hold their beer bellies at bay and seeking
sexual pleasure through inappropriate and often illegal digital relationships –
by its definition and Siekmeier's suggestion, Facebook stalking hardly requires
40 years of celibate life, preying on
little girls and boys.
We may all have a little stalker in us, after all.
“Our stalking inclinations come from our sense of desire to
constantly compare ourselves with others – we're always looking to compare
ourselves to feel better,” said Mark Lee, an assistant professor of marketing
in the College of Business at CSU.
As a self-proclaimed “big Facebook user,” Lee boasts more
than 1,000 online friends, an ever-growing number. Many of these friends he
doesn't know as more than a friend of a friend of a friend, but keeps for
business and networking purposes. Still, he recognizes the common abuse of
social networking; for some it becomes a venue for nearly all of their
interaction with, and about, others.
“And with the
introduction of social media on mobile devices, everyone – especially teenagers
– can instantly spread rumors, gossip and information anywhere and anytime,
making it (stalking inclinations) worse,” he said.
This constant need for comparison not only demands hours of
users’ time, beckoning them further into the depths of family members',
friends' and strangers' digital lives, but has now grabbed hold of user’s very
happiness.
As if a performer in play, users convince themselves they
are being watched. They become self-conscious of the cyber-image they portray
to others, imagining every friend they've acquired on Facebook monitoring their
every post and picture.
“Adolescents, the largest group on social media –
specifically Facebook in the United States – live with the need for social
commentary on their 'selves' and they live with an 'imaginary audience' of
sorts,” said Donna Rouner, a professor of journalism at CSU. “They are always
'on,' acting for that audience...they view their friends as this audience for
whom to perform and from where they receive commentary...”
And how best to cater to this audience then to know it
better?
According to Lee, users turn to stalking their friends
online in order to better present exactly the person they wish for their
friends to see. But the amount of time a user spends visiting friends’ profiles
may directly correlate to his or her self-esteem.
“People try to show their best on Facebook; when we stalk,
we are stalking other people's best looking pictures, or of them having fun and
this is when self-esteem issues come into play,” he said. “We begin to struggle
with our own identity and ask ourselves questions like 'Why are they having fun
and I’m not? Why are they looking better while I'm not? How come they got to do
that and I couldn't?' We want to see what others are doing so we can do the
same thing.”
Impression management, a term originally applied in social
psychology and now increasingly used by social media experts such as Lee,
centers around the idea of this obsession with how others portray themselves on
the Internet leading to an obsession of how an individual portrays his or
herself in the same arena.
It's like having the chance to step outside your body and
step into God's. One has access to all the shaping, molding, erasing and
creating available with a mouse and broadband.
The thing is, one's “extended identity,” as Lee coined it,
can more or less be entirely fabricated.
“I started going to events solely because I knew people
would be taking pictures and putting them on Facebook; of course, the only
pictures I stayed tagged in were the attractive ones,” Siekmeier confessed, her
cheeks rouging and eyes darting to the floor. “I wanted to create this image
that made people think I was deep and insightful and really wise and did a lot
of really cool things. When I felt bad about myself I would go on Facebook and
look at my profile to make me feel better.”
Existing altogether online, however, isn't possible – and
when reality finally strikes, it strikes hard.
According to Lee there are two realms of existence: one's
online presence and one's offline life. When the two begin to bleed into each
other, as is becoming more and more common, problems abound and it gets
personal.
Chris Hess, director of local Fort Collin's coffee shop
Everyday Joe's, knows just how personal it can get. In this case, it involved
his first-born son.
While exiting his pregnant wife's hospital room moments
after their wailing infant child burst into the world, still dripping muck and
goo, Hess came upon two strangers lingering just outside the door.
“Hey Chris! How's Jess doing?” the as-of-yet unidentified
women inquired.
“Excuse me, but who are you?” Hess responded incredulously.
“Friends of Jess's...we saw your post about the baby on
Facebook so thought we would come say hello,” they replied shamelessly.
The two women were indeed friends of Hess's wife Jess...2
1/2 years previously when she was attending CSU as a college freshman. Neither
Hess nor Jess had spoken to them since.
“I think because access to Internet information is so
immediate, people don't have filters instilled – or maybe they never had the
filter because they never had access like they do now,” Hess said, recalling
what he refers to as “the hospital incident.” “Access to information is so
readily available and people just don't know how to handle it. It's a really
weird thing.”
The Hess family had posted the birth announcement on
Facebook, but had not intended nor imagined anyone showing up at the hospital,
spoiling a rather sacred and personal moment for the new family. After this,
however, they immediately ceased use of both their personal Facebook profiles,
but have chosen to retain a Twitter account.
Needless to say, the birth last month of their second son,
Garrison, was not tweeted to the public.
A line between an individual's online and offline activity,
according to Lee, must be drawn in order to maintain the status quo of social
appropriateness and acceptability in both environments.
Checking up on the new-born Hess online is different than in
person and what may seem acceptable illuminated on a computer screen may not pale when held up to the light – the
real light of day, that is.
“You have to be careful of what you are doing online and
remember to limit yourself,” Lee said. “It can sometimes get scary. Like, if
you are stalking someone online, you can't think the same is okay offline.”
Examining and understanding the motives behind Facebook
activity is important not only in determining what is appropriate to do and say
while traversing the lines between real and cyber life, but also in gleaning
value from personal relationships.
Regardless of how many likes your Facebook status got
yesterday, if your flesh and bone relationships remain desolate and abandoned,
Lee recommends a reevaluation of your social media use.
“For some people, checking Facebook is the first thing they
do in the morning and the last thing they do before they go to sleep at night,”
Lee said, characterizing a common symptom of what he considers to be an overuse
of social media. “They have to understand what gratification they want out of
it – Facebook becomes a popularity contest in many ways and can really devalue
the whole idea of relationships.”
To Siekmeier, the idea of her profile – a simple web page
filled with her favorite movies, books and quotes that only seemed to simplify
the magnificent uniqueness of her as an individual – being the only connection
to those she loved most became more troubling as she entered her current junior
year of college.
So, she killed her cyber-self.
“I deleted my Facebook. There's so much less info to
process everyday – so many fewer relationships and so much less emotional
energy to siphon through when you don't have to learn tons of useless crap
about everyone everyday on your news feed,” Siekmeier said in a valiant tone,
clearly enjoying her release from a bondage she felt so shamed about.
For Hess, the deletion of his profile was a “muting of all
the channels of noise” cluttering his days he would rather spend truly getting
to know his coffee customers in face to face relationships.
And although both he and Siekmeier said they can see the
attractive advantages of quickly accessed information, widespread communication
and simple connectivity to friends and family at nearly any point in the
day...they don't miss it at all.
“There are certain times I wish I could look through
pictures of a friend or find out where someone is living now; you know, get all
the quick info,” Siekmeier said. “But I also find that the people I truly care
about I still keep in contact with, I've just found different ways to talk to
them. Instead of learning things passively, I actually have to write them and
find out what they were doing.”
As for John, he now attends Siekmeier's church with his
wife, his son Boom and the newest addition to the family, Noah.
This, Siekmeier said, she knows because she asked.
In numbers...
1 in every 13 people has a Facebook, with more than 500
million users worldwide
More than 50% of users log in everyday
48% of 18-24 year-old users check Facebook when they wake
up
28% of 18-24 year-old users check Facebook before getting
out of bed
48% of 18-34 year-old users cite Facebook as primary
source of news
In 2011, “liking” drugs rose by 1,131.9 percent
57% of people say they talk
to others more online than they do in person
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