Hizir@flickr

There have always been stalkers – those crazed fans that go through dustbins in LA side-streets, the lurkers who wait outside office blocks to follow a stranger home along sixteen city blocks, the unhinged ex-lover who rings the phone then slams it down after they’ve heard the beloved one’s voice, then wait outside their home for a glimpse as the once-upon-a-time-lover leaves for a family trip with their new partner. All of these ‘stalkers’ had some common themes, they pursued information about an individual, their private life and their movements that they were not at the time entitled to possess, that they had no legitimate reason to possess or use. In the end, it was all about information (and in some cases, some pretty psychotic over-investment in someone else’s life).

Some have called what we live in the Information Age, and that’s fairly accurate when it comes to the new breed of stalker. They could be in your neighbourhood, they could be on your bus, serving you coffee, lending you library books, meeting you at an AA meeting, on your street, in your house, in your bed, you. I am a stalker. It happened quite by surprise. I suddenly realised that thanks to the twin tools of google and facebook, I could now stalk anyone whose first name I knew, or whose place of work I knew, or who I knew was friends with someone I knew, or might have joined a group I had joined, RSVP’d to an event I was notified of. Whatever, it was all too easy. And common.

I sheepishly asked around, trying to suss out what the protocol was, and how others, more savvy than I, might be negotiating this plethora of information at their fingertips – were there rules governing the accessing of this information – was there an Guide to the Etiquette of Cyber-Stalking that had made the Times best-seller list a couple of years ago that I hadn’t noticed because I had my head stuck up a bear’s bum? After taking some soundings, and doing a bit of research it seems that no, there are no hard nor fast rules. But there’s plenty of talk about it – and that got me to wondering about the shift from stalking being something that people perceive as crazed or psychotic, almost definitely threatening behaviour, to it becoming something that you do when you get home from that work-function on a thursday night.

Standards of acceptable behaviour change across time, true. To pull a couple of examples off the top of my head – oral sex, racial intermarriage, homosexuality. In all of the examples I can think of, the reason I see for the change in attitude is a recognition that in fact these behaviours are not harmful, have never been harmful, and thus there exists no legitimate reason for them to be deemed unacceptable. Stalking, on the other hand, is still deemed harmful within some contexts (for example, most of those mentioned in the opening paragraph). But apparently, when proper restraint is applied, stalking, and again, I use the term to refer to the gaining of information about an individual that someone at this time has no legitimate reason to possess and use, has become commonplace and acceptable. Is this because ‘I want to know’ is a legitimate reason? I want to know about the man I met last night, I know his first name, I enter it into facebook search, sooner (usually) rather than later, locate him, and voila! I can choose to be at an event that he has RSVP’d to. Is this where the line is crossed? I’m not sure, but I am sure I’m going to have to be careful not to let slip that I already know enough about him to fill both sides of a few sheets of A4 paper.

The option of setting one’s profile to private, is of course one way of circumventing this process, so I suppose that by not selecting that option, one is tacitly approving of the use of online information in this manner. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. The Information Age is an age of change, as they all are, and I’m still not sure if I like this change, this shortcutting of the ‘getting to know, you, getting to learn all about you’ process. But that hasn’t stopped me from exploiting the information that is at my fingertips, that I have no right to possess other than the right I grant myself, because, hey, I want to know.