Thursday, January 21, 2010

Little Miss Stalker

I am guilty as charged. I am a self-confessed (Facebook) stalker, together with millions of other people, I bet. I stalk my family, siblings, my closest friends, my ex, the ex of my ex, my boyfriend, his ex, our neighbour, my not so close friends. I actually stalk whoever piques my interest for the day. Just the other day, I scanned the photos of a friend of a friend and was actually surprised to discover several “objectionable” photos in the site (I refuse to be more specific). Confrontation ensued and accusations thrown. Though not baseless, my accusation was ridiculous and speculative at the most. But my point is that, I actually got mad just because of a photo I saw in Facebook. Shouldn’t that even be considered as Fruit of a Poisonous Tree? By browsing through his friends’ photos, what did I expect to see? The expected and the unexpected, of course. I should expect (or not) to see just about anything! People shamelessly post everything and anything these days. Because gone are those days when people wrote their thoughts on their well-kept and safely padlocked diaries. Now the trend is to let the whole world know what you’re doing. Create a shot out here, tweet your mind out there or make a comment, post all the photos you want. The internet, or to be more specific, these social networking websites are just too stalker-friendly. These sites have created stalkers in all of us. Coming to think of it, with all of us becoming the stalkers that we are now, it is surprising to see that people still continue to use these sites. It is probably because when people post everything it comes with the assurance in mind that whatever will be posted, although will not delight everyone’s taste, will nevertheless be respected because of the concept of freedom of expression. It is also worthy to point out that, at the end of the day, it is still within our prerogative on how “stalker-friendly” our site is going to be. With the privacy settings of Facebook, it actually is still possible to control who will be able to access our site. Therefore, no matter how free we all are to express our thoughts and our individuality through the net, we still have to remain cautious and responsible on whatever we post because the internet is really stalker-infested. The scary thing about that is we never know how all the data and information, posts or photos we put in the net are going to be used by our stalkers. On this note, I think it proper to say condolences to privacy and regards to freedom of expression!!

6th entry

Photo source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRoFX7vlvUOMo6hhnTXTJ2OtBjXWlluTe5cQW1DPes5UdxX_YbbsVE6NQGnzLtBRyqfcNvaxmBhQ7295RoUU6c_p08-sg5q-5y7OnRhZ_As1LXinUWW4mgBvyiAUfyQiPaHy3uWPx4JwE/s220/little+miss+giggles.jpg

1 comment:

Owen Ricalde said...

hindi ka naman nag-iisa carol ;) kaya nga halos lahat nagalit nung meron dati sa friendster na makikita mo kung sino nagview sa profile mo etc ;) come to think of it, pati sa multiply ganon pero i guess multiply users know what they are getting themselves into. or yung ibang kilala ko, gumagamit ng mock account! haha