We’ve all done it. Plenty of my friends have even bragged about their skill at it. The desperate but clever rummage through the remarkably drunken underwear drawer of someone else’s status updates, photos, timeline or whatever. And now Zuckerberg & Co. are about to turn it up a notch to include reports on groups so that we can see when other users have accessed content. It’s not dissimilar to the existing reports you receive in chat windows when the person you’re talking to has seen what you’ve written, but it does add to the ever-obsessive stalker culture that’s already prevalent on the site. Could they be moving toward adding this to everyone’s profiles?
But why would we need to know when people’ve seen our updates? Why would we care?
Facebook is planning on instituting the service, which could very cleverly work as an anti-stalking device too, because it will alert users to who’s accessed what info and when. It’s not on a level outside the groups just yet, but I’m sure it’ll make it’s way to our individual profiles eventually. This will either create major discouragement for anyone who’s prone to a good stalk or hype up the pseudo-celebrity factor of who’s seen who’s posts (which will be, you know, bullshit).
While this may seem a sort of violation in and of itself, it fits in pretty well with what Facebook already is anyway.
Mark Zuckerberg’s original model for the world’s most blue & white social network was essentially based around the idea of cliques, with users adding “friends” in order to share info at them. Your profile has grown from then into a digitalized version of your life; an avatar of yourself as the party animal who never sleeps, always shares the wittiest overheard jokes (now courtesy 9gag rather than your funnier best friend with self esteem issues) and it’s even adopted the unironic ‘like’.
The development of the timeline fully digitalized the concept of memory, and so it only makes sense that the next thing they’d do is digitize your real world senses. In the distant past before common home internet usage that some of us like to call The 90s…
The 90s…
…if you met someone and liked them, you’d have to go through very specific channels to find out more about them. You may get their number, go out for lunch or dinner, actually talk to them, or at least hit up common friends for some info and probably in the hope that your buddy will drop some hints about how single, smart and desperate you are.
In the age of Facebook, a quick rattle of my fingertips across my keyboard can tell me who you know, what you like, where you work, and whether or not we’re going to agree that Bowie’s career in the 80s was a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Today, I don’t even need the coffee date. I can date you by digital proxy and decide how our entire relationship will go before I’ve even switched tabs to see how my Youtube video is holding out in that awkward buffering stage. Besides the fact that I can add your pictures to the folder I mark “not porn” on my hard drive, this is already a pretty unhealthy way to go on living.
In real life when someone stares at you from across the office, or is always mysteriously hanging out in the bush across from your house, shaking violently, you tend to notice and take out a restraining order. Or at least you point out to them that their shoelace is undone and then make a break for your car and never come back.
If you don’t, well, you’ve reached levels of narcissicm even I hadn’t imagined. And I’m saying this as a grown man who’s renamed himself something that sounds like the punchline to a bad children’s joke.
I think we all agree that, while the law is too strict on “non-practising Rastafari”, it’s pretty solid when it comes to stalking. That is to say, it ain’t cool with it.
“For Jahahahahahaha!”
And why we stalk isn’t always because of a healthy interest in someone, an unhealthy interest in them, or because of an inability to turn off Google SafeSearch. Sometimes, as I’ve discovered, it’s out of a sense of envy. Some folks will google the lives of others to see what it is that they themselves are lacking, and that’s not sad for the stalkee, but for the stalker. I mean, just recently I’ve had someone try to Facebook stalk someone else I know to see why I think they’re great, as if something in the myriad albums of them getting tanked drunk will reveal what’s so awesome about them.
So yeah, Facebook may be slowly moving towards a time when they take away your stalk function. For some, that’ll mean healthier living. For others? Well, you’ll always have that die hard Google+ movement, homey.