Virtual Death

"It is only stalking when the person pursuing you is not cute, otherwise it is love" said a female professor who was "stalked" by a foreign professor in one of the moot competitions. The actus reus of stalking being that he booked a room beside hers on more than one occasion.

Six years ago I reluctantly joined friendster with the primary goal of gathering intelligence on women friends and guy enemies. Through friendster I managed to gather a lot of information on potential enemies and potential dates. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

I realized then that I now had a "virtual life" through which I kept connected with friends adrift at sea or just bumming around in the states. I valued comments and testimonials of friends like a permanent yearbook that I could readily show to anyone who checks out my profile.

Checking out profiles became a hobby until friendster decided to incorporate the "who's viewed me" feature in which case I just decided that it is more important to know people who are viewing me that to view profiles anonymously.

Until last summer. An unknown person emailed me threats and whatnot, sending me messages on friendster, and even showed me my pictures which I later realized came from friendster and facebook. I realized the potentiality of this happening long ago so I set my profile parameters as secure as I can, but apparently kung gusto may paraan.

So I decided to kill my virtual self by deleting my friendster and facebook accounts. Although I could always reactivate my facebook account and play mafia wars again, I lost my friendster profile along with all the testimonials and the far-away-friend-connections I had. Fortunately friendster did not delete my blog there, although I could never update that blog again.

The unknown person turned out to be a woman scorned of which hell knew not such fury. Although presently a peace has been declared, I am still jogged by the thought that a virtual fight or war can now be fought and that my virtual life was a willing casualty.