Facebook: Social Networking or Stalking?

Tonight I read an article from the Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "The Fakebook Generation" from October 6th, 2007. In this article the author Alice Mathias, a recent graduate from Dartmouth University, discusses the popular website Facebook and whether or not that website is achieving its goal of social networking. One of the main things she points out is the privacy that is offered by the website and which aspects of that privacy are important to most people in our generation. Although the website offers its members alot of privacy options, the most popular option is that people will not see when the member is currently online. People do not want their friends knowing when they are on the website, regardless of what they are doing on the website. However, many people are not ashamed to show pictures of themselves consuming large amounts of alcohol or partaking in sexual activities. This shows how our generation functions since they are more embarrassed of people finding out they are at home than they are of people seeing pictures of them that they might later regret taking.

Another interesting topic she brings up is when she mentions a possible program that would let other people know who is looking at their page. As a college student, I know many of my friends who go online and "e-stalk" the guys who they might have crushes on, or see what their friends are doing that they were not invited too. Internet sites such as this make it much easier for people to see who is doing what and when and this can be highly addictive for many college students. However, facebook has many advantages in connecting people on a college campus who might never meet but have many of the same interests. This social networking aspect can be extremely beneficial for many college students.

Although I no longer log onto facebook, I found this article extremely interesting because the author seems to enjoy the way people use it. Without this website, how else would people be able to stalk the people they are too embarrassed to approach in real life?


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