‘a race of peeping toms’: facebook stalking and geo-location
The first thing I thought when I heard about location-based social networking was, ‘Why? Who the crap cares where I am? And why should I care what other people are doing?’ But, apparently, I’m a little bit old fashioned. Put simply, servers such as Foursquare are game-like social networking sites which award ‘badges’ to users who register their current location. Such is the popularity of networks like Foursquare or Gowalla (traffic to Foursquare went up 200 per cent between November 2009 and February of this year) that both Facebook and Twitter are about to jump on the location-mapping bandwagon.
We’ve all heard of Facebook stalking. Unlike the more traditional waiting-in-the-bushes-outside-your-house brand, the kind of ‘stalking’ that happens on Facebook is the generally harmless browsing of other people’s profiles that lingers slightly too long (note: this is not to be confused with cyber bullying). Most of us have, at one time or another, perused the digitised social history of some high school acquaintance or other, mentally criticising the heavy-handed application of fake tan and inappropriate use of beige lipstick; lusting over the ‘indie cred’ of associates who got invited to that party (when you didn’t); looking at all 467 pictures of that-cute-guy-you-kind-of-like just because you can. As the Urban Dictionary—which is always great for definitions about memes and other popular phenomena—puts it:
Facebook Stalking, like regular stalking, allows the stalker to secretly gather information about the person they are interested in; the stalkee if you will. Unlike regular stalking, Facebook Stalking is less likely to have an illegal component and is generally accepted by its voyeuristic victims. The argument being, that if you didn’t want others to know about your life, you wouldn’t post it all over the internet.
Person 1: Do you have a crush on Billy?
Person 2: I’m not sure yet, I need to go home and do some Facebook Stalking first.
But this distinction between Facebook stalking and the ‘Oh, fancy running into you here, at your local café’ kind may begin to blur when Facebook and Twitter take on the characteristics of Foursquare, which they plan to implement in the coming months. Rumours about Facebook’s plans to include geolocation in its services have been circulating since March, and Twitter has already briefly previewed its own interpretation of the trend.
The implications of these new developments are either going to be, well … creepy, or just really, very annoying. That all of your ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ (most of whom you haven’t seen in years and don’t care to) can know where your local haunts are, where you live and what you do seems dangerous and unnecessary: one user told Read Write Web that he uses location services for ‘chance meetups with people I know in the city.’ Although both Facebook and Twitter have customisable privacy settings, their popularity and the possible inability of young or inexperienced users to protect their personal information will certainly be cause for complaint. But apart from personal safety, Foursquare-like functions on Facebook and Twitter seem like yet another avenue through which we can gain cultural capital by going to all the right places and ‘making poor people feel bad’. Which seems facetious at best.
Hi Dijana,
Interesting and alarming post. I can’t see myself using such a function, even if I do ever get with the times. About making poor people feel bad, perhaps if people start to worry about what their whereabouts says about their socio-economic status, perhaps they need to assess the extent of their online visibility, and the quality of their contacts. To recall an old-fashioned value, real friends shouldn’t care if your whereabouts (or your attire, and so on) signal your poverty (or lack thereof). Or am I being hopelessly naive?
Jen
The answers to your two questions (“Who the crap cares where I am? And why should I care what other people are doing?”) are exactly what appeals to Facebook lovers. Following the link to the Read Write Web article (“Making poor people feel bad”), I read comments that explain that these new features on Facebook continue to define the social site as an avenue to show off and a means to share every moment.
In my primary school days, classmates would discuss every little detail of the party or drama at school over the phone the day it happened. So who would care about where you are or what you’re doing or what you’re wearing or who said what? People who already care about those things.
Technology allows us to do more of what we already do. As a friend once told me, “It only shows what already goes on in real life anyway.”
The use of ‘Facebook’ is a voluntary action, and i think people should be responsible for what they have posted online. You have become a public once you put all your personal information on Facebook, and i think facebook users should not have the absolute rights to blame others who frequently visits your account (frequent visitors may be seen as facebook stalkers).
I agree that you’re voluntarily making your life and behaviour public when you have a Facebook page, and I intended to make it clear that ‘Facebook stalking’ is a relatively harmless exercise (‘stalking’ is just an idiom, after all: its name implies that it is more serious than it actually is).
However, I do think that the generation below us does not/will not have the same perspective on privacy that we do. Which could potentially be damaging to them. Especially when they’re disclosing their location to people who would only tenuously be considered friends (or who they don’t actually know at all).
Great post! And great photo montage…