Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Psychology of Facebook

Facebook has been a topic of many of my conversations lately and also something I spent too much time on so I thought I would pause my dating commentary to talk about the Psychology of Facebook. I am fascinated with social networking so this is an interesting topic to me.

First, Facebook breeds stalking. This takes several forms - first is the "friend stalking". You track your friends, their status, their pictures, what they are doing. You don't even have to have a conversation with your friends you can just ask "How was NY" even though the only reason you know they went to NY was because of their status update. Weird, huh?

There is also "I-want-to-be-your-friend stalking". These are the people that you may have met and one of you friended the other on Facebook. You want to get to know these people better so you track what they are doing from afar. They don't know you check their page and that you know what they are up to. This is also known as "creepy stalking".

There is "tantalizing stalking". This is when you post something on purpose in hopes that someone will see the picture, your status, your comment, etc. You want people to know what a great weekend you had or the cool thing that you did or you want people to see how good you looked last weekend. You aren’t just posting things so your friends know what you are up to - you are posting in hopes that a specific friend will check out what you are up to.

There is also "stalking your stalker". This is when you install a program that tracks who visits your page. For instance, you can load StatCounter on your page and it will show all the IPs and their locations across the globe that have visited your page. So you are seeing who is checking out your page.

Seems like society today is breeding stalkers and Facebook is encouraging it. You have to stalk or be stalked...welcome to social networking.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a new word to propose: "fralking" (friend stalking). Unfortunately, it sounds more like something you do to windows to keep drafts out. :)

Brooke said...

A friend mentioned that I should ad "ex-stalking" - when you stalk your ex on google, facebook, the internet, etc to see what they are up too. I DO NOT recommend this type of stalking because you probably don't know what they are doing and it probably opens a window a crack instead of providing closure.

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