Facebook: The Creator of Creepers and Stalkers

Facebook: The Creator of stalkers and creepers

The anticipation of going to college, in my opinion, is far more exciting than actually going to college itself. This beforehand period is filled with parties, presents, goodbyes, dorm room shopping, and new facebook friends. Once you join your college’s network you begin to get bombarded with new friend requests left and right. And just because you’re in this anticipation phase, you accept them all. Suddenly you find yourself with as many friends at the school you have yet to attend as you do from the school you’ve just attended for four years. This is the terrible mistake that most people make, a mistake I am guilty of making as well.
Why is this so bad? You have now opened the door to facebook creepers and stalkers. Now this in itself brings up the question of how to define a creeper and a stalker. Urban dictionary defines a creeper as, “Someone who views your profile (multiple times) without saying anything.” They are those who won’t try to talk to you but will try to keep up with your life through your status updates and pictures. And a stalker is primarily the same, except that they will actually try to talk to you as if they know you, or in a bad case will find out where you will be and will show up with hopes of getting to see you. I also like to refer to stalkers as fake friends, in the sense that they feel they know so much about you that they believe they are your friend.
Upon my arrival to SMU I was very astonished by the amount of people in my department who would come up to me and knew my name. When I would give them a confused look they would respond with, “We are friends on facebook.” I continued to overwhelm with fear when I started getting texts from numbers I didn’t know, with people using my first name. “Who is this and how did they get my number,” was my frequent response. When asked they would reply, “ I got your number from facebook.” These things sparked something inside of me. I began to get very uncomfortable. I logged on to facebook and began to filter everything I had on it. I took off some pictures, took off my contact information, edited my personal information, and even deleted some of my “friends”.
Facebook is spawns a lot of innocent bystanders into creepers and stalkers who spend all their time on facebook refreshing the page to see the new status updates every 30 seconds. It’s also empowers people to talk freely online and gives them the strength the say what they are unable to in face-to-face conversations. I am also a victim of the effects of “facebook courage”. Before I came to SMU, a lot of my new SMU “friends” would try to facebook chat me. They would ask me questions about which dorm I was assigned, where I was from, and what my major was. I found those to be harmless. Then there was this one guy. He seemed nice but would try and talk to me like everyday. I was trying to be polite so I would frequently say “hey” but then quickly sign off. I figured he was a creeper. Of coarse, the first day of classes I walk into my wellness class to find the guy sitting across the room. I smiled politely and quickly sat down. We had to play a “getting to know you game” and when I had to “get to know” him, he acted as if he didn’t even know who I was. This was bad to me, but what I find equally worse are when you are “talking” to someone and they are able to spill their guts over the Internet, but can’t speak three words to you in person. Facebook facilitates their fear of human contact. If we continue at this rate, in ten years our world will be filled with cowardly creepers, who spend all day and night online, stalking people like you. Maybe you’ll think twice before you add a new friend or post something new again.

The Jena who?

When you turn on the TV nowadays you are bombarded with stories about the Spear’s family, the latest fashion trends, and the scores of the Sunday night NFL game. What about the important and relevant stories? Most of these stories get the spotlight for a brief period of time, typically less than a week, and then they are over shadowed by YouTube videos that Paris Hilton made. A story that is victim to this crime is that of the Jena Six.
You may or may not have heard of them, hopefully you have. They are a group of six black students from the ages of 15 to 17 who have been arrested and some convicted of attempted second-degree murder. I’m sure you’re wondering what heinous crime they committed. They got into a fight with some white students, in which one of the white males got some bruises and a concussion. I know what you’re thinking, “That’s all?” This is a typical response; this is the same one I experienced upon learning about the Jena Six. This fight broke out after three nooses appeared on a tree that a black student had sat under, a tree that was known as being “reserved” to the white students. This incident was the breaking point after a long list of racial issues that the school and town have faced. It took the white jury only two days to come to a decision. I don’t know what is more appalling to me, the fact that racist towns such as Jena, Louisiana still exist, that our government has done nothing to help the situation, or that the news media has become so corrupt by gossip stories that stories like the Jena Six are only briefly mentioned. Or maybe what is most disturbing is that our country is trying to make peace between two countries in the Middle East, and yet we can’t make peace in our own.


http://www.democracynow.org/2007/7/10/the_case_of_the_jena_six