“Facebook poking isn’t creepy, right? After all, everyone likes to be acknowledged! And sometimes it’s just nice to know that someone is checking you out, looking at your pics and comments and wondering if you’ve changed your status since lunch. That may sound a bit borderline stalkerish, but whose really to blame? It’s not like you hear people talking about this stuff, because nobody likes talking about their personal business or anything, but let’s just create a scenario and hypothesize a conclusion: Facebook profiles are created for a number of reasons, one of them being communication.”
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Facebook poking isn’t creepy, right?

After all, everyone likes to be acknowledged!

And sometimes it’s just nice to know that someone is checking you out, looking at your pics and comments and wondering if you’ve changed your status since lunch.

That may sound a bit borderline stalkerish, but whose really to blame?

It’s not like you hear people talking about this stuff, because nobody likes talking about their personal business or anything, but let’s just create a scenario and hypothesize a conclusion:

Facebook profiles are created for a number of reasons, one of them being communication.

Finding classmates becomes much more convenient, and for some reason it’s so much easier to talk to that cute boy or girl online than in person.

Facebook profiles are also developed to be a reflection of you, meaning your personality, lifestyle, interests and so on.

That’s not to say that any of that information is actually credible or true, but nevertheless, one can agree that you are trying to portray a certain image to people.

Whether it is an honest representation of yourself or not, the ultimate goal seems to be to get noticed by people who share similar interests as the one portrayed in your profile.

To phrase it a different way, Facebook profiles are used to draw people in.

So, let’s say you saw a cute girl in class, and you really want to get to know her better.

You know her name, so naturally you search for her on Facebook and browse her profile for a bit.

When you’re done looking through all of her pictures, you then decide it might be helpful to skim through her profile.

This may come off as a bit eerie, but who amongst us isn’t guilty of doing something like this?

It didn’t quite seem so creepy at the time when you were doing it, so why does it sound so bad now?

Could it be because of the fact that people are getting sued for it?

Here’s a thought:

If you have a restraining order preventing you from any contact with someone, it’s probably safe to assume that poking them on Facebook is not a good idea.

This meant nothing to a woman in Tennesse, who proceeded to poke another woman with such a restraint.

The end result: she was arrested.

When you think about it that way, it’s really nothing to poke fun at.

Yes, Facebook stalking is wrong and should definitely be punished, but can only one person be found to blame?

The above story is probably a different circumstance, but when going back to the whole scenario of creating a profile designed to attract people, it’s not fair to say that every person who browses on Facebook is the predator.

They made privacy settings for a reason, yet you’ll probably find that most of the people you hear complaining about stalkers use very little of them.

You can probably customize hundreds of different privacy settings and options, so it’s not like you are limited to being either extremely conservative or liberal.

No one ever deserves to be stalked and not everyone is guilty of causing it, but let’s face it:

If your profile doesn’t have some kind of privacy setting you are certainly not helping the situation.

Another thing to consider is this:

Your profile may attract many different kinds of people.

Judging someone by the contents of their Facebook is anything but a good idea.

Remember that sometimes, this little thing happens where people lie about themselves.

Other times, people will do or say things online that will give people the wrong impression.

Has this ever happened to you? Yeah, thought so.

That might be because it has everything to do with the fact that there’s more to communication than texts and typing.

It’s hard to convey true emotion sometimes when you just have something that’s written down and not a frown or tone of voice to associate it with and don’t even try to justify it with colons and parenthesis.

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