In the old days, it was very clear who was a creep and who wasn't. Drunk Jimmy who squatted in the house next door and threw beer bottles into toddler's backyards: creep. That biology teacher who offered young female students back massages after school: creep. Pee−wee Herman: definitely a creep.
In these modern times, however, the divide between creep and say, your average college student with Wi−Fi, is becoming dangerously indistinct. When Al Gore invented the internet in 1995, the steel barricades between the likes of registered sex offenders and ourselves were reduced to picket fences. Then Facebook.com hit, and suddenly Radiohead's first big hit started to feel like everyone's guilty personal anthem.
I knew it was true when I received an unabashed invitation to a Facebook group called "I Creep Daily." Actually, I knew it was true when my family and I spent several hours looking at my freshman roommate−to−be's profile pictures and arguing over whether she was Persian or Peruvian. (Turns out she's from Jersey. She just had a tan.) Or maybe I knew it was true when I knew all of my sister's new boyfriend's interests before we had met. No, I knew it was true when I let it slip that I knew where a (very cute) classmate was from — before he told me himself. He called me on it, and what could I say? "Oh, I know that because I find you attractive so I looked at your Facebook page. I also noticed you are ‘single' and ‘interested in women'— I happen to be both of those things, perhaps I could be of help in that department?" No. I lied through my teeth and told him he had mentioned it earlier. I'll never know if he believed it, but judging by my lack of "In a Relationship" with him, I am guessing no.
Remember the fear that struck our hearts when Facebook came out with that application that tells you who has looked at your page, and when? I swear on the library roof, I would have died of mortification if that thing had done what I thought it was doing — sending everyone whose profile you view a notification that you have viewed it. I was not the only one shaking in my Facebook−stalking boots, and I'm sure I heard a campus wide sigh of relief when it became clear that the app had to be opted into. Why? Because we are all creeps. It is more than slightly unsettling.
Don't tell me that you haven't ended up analyzing your ex's "About Me" at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night when you're supposed to be studying for midterms, or looked up that guy from around campus that you/your roommate/your entire house has a crush on and read his interests aloud to your friends. Don't tell me you've never gone to your arch−nemesis' page and silently insulted every profile picture she has, or looked at events on other people's walls and invited yourself to them. Don't tell me you haven't turned to the relationship status feature to help you figure out your prospects for the weekend, and been frustrated when it's left blank, or worse, when the girl you're crushing on is engaged to her roommate or "It's complicated" with her BFF. Don't tell me you don't use Facebook to find out information you would never dream of asking for about people you barely know. I don't believe you.
Don't feel bad, or at least don't feel alone, because 99.9 percent of us do it. The call of free, available information is just too great to resist — how do you think Google became an empire? Classify that information as gossip and boom — we are goners, powerless against the siren call of everyone's favorite social networking sites. We never even had a chance.
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Jessie Borkan is a senior majoring in psychology. She can be reached at Jessie.Borkan@tufts.edu.
