Any person who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows another person in the state of California is guilty of the crime of stalking, punishable by a restraining order, a fine or jail time. Why is it that when it comes to Facebook, stalking is okay?
As any Facebook addict will tell you, Facebook is a way to reunite with old friends, keep in contact with family and showcase your skills and personality to potential employers.
But we all know this is BS.
More than 600 million unique users spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, according to the website’s 2011 fact sheet. That’s one in every 13 people on earth, with more than 250 million of them logging on every day. Approximately 48 percent of 18 to 34 year olds, Facebook’s core audience, check their profile when they wake up, with 28 percent doing so before even getting out of bed.
However, I refuse to believe that all that time is being spent in social networking mode ”” reminiscing with high school acquaintances, estranged relatives and old co-workers. Give me a break. It is being spent in creep mode.
Stop obsessing over the photos of your ex-boyfriend’s new album, stop checking for your ex-girlfriend’s mobile phone status updates, stop Facebook stalking. Stop Facebook all together and deactivate your account.
It is a waste of time and is contributing to the destruction of the very thing it promotes ”” social networking.
Anonymous • Apr 6, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Bold statement, but it is one I can get down with, and is also under-vocalized in our culture. Facebook is like the newest cancer: we are memorized by it, we talk about, but we can’t just get rid of it. I hate that Facebook (I suppose rightfully so) received credit for making the revolts in the middle east possible. It’s hard to argue against that, but otherwise, it seems like Facebook is offering a war against genuine human interaction and interpersonal communication skills — just like text messaging. But I suppose we still must remember that Facebook users are still an extreme minority if the 1 out of 13 figure is correct, it just seems like for us youngens that everyone and their mother are wasting their time on Facebook.
As far as online stalking goes, when you put your info willfully into cyberspace, what problem do you have a right to have, and why should you care, about whether people are looking you up? And I thought Facebook allowed users to make their profiles private, in some capacity unlike Myspace, which is why I thought Facebook is now number one and Myspace is like obsolete? Nevermind. Who cares.
At bottom, though, social networking sites are venues for self-promotion, epitomizing the narcissistic culture we live in at this time in human history. It allows us to navigate through other peoples lives safely, and without repercussion. It allows us to show the world a false sense of who we are, thereby falsely propping up our self-esteem, by uploading all our “happy” pics where the world can see just how great our lives truly are. There are surely wonderful things that Facebook allows us to do — organize revolts against tyranny is probably the most important — but, at the end of the day, I would prefer that Facebook, like Starbucks, just go f*#$ off.