The average teenage girl would likely tell you that she can find the entirety of someone’s extended family within five minutes online. It’s become a universal experience, stemming from getting way too comfortable and invested in finding out every minor detail about someone, often a romantic interest or arch nemesis. Internet privacy is basically non-existent when taking into consideration how easy it is to find out extreme amounts of information about someone simply from their Instagram and other social media profiles.
The temptation to know everything about someone often prompts quick online searches. This results in further research into their entire extended family as well. This behavior raises a question of the nature behind this curiosity: Is it indicative of an overly nosy generation, or does it instead suggest a pure talent for investigation? Either way, social media stalking has taken a new turn in societal norms in recent years.
I interviewed multiple groups (older generations who can barely use their phones as it is, those who still post boomerangs on Instagram, and those who have had iPads since they were 5) of people, asking their opinions regarding social media stalking. Starting with those who had never even heard the term “iPhone” growing up, then onto the middle grounders with flip phones, and finally to our generation of Division I stalkers.
“No, I haven’t really thought about stalking one of my friends on social media, but I guess I also don’t consider it stalking when I look up someone’s name out of curiosity,” 81 year old Pat Bruch said.
Perhaps the motivation and the intent behind looking up someone’s name in the Instagram search bar is what draws the line to being considered a “stalker”. Is it to genuinely see who they are as a person, or is it done with mal intent to zoom in and out of photos, even in their tagged posts from their moms Instagrams?
Maybe it’s not our generation’s excessive obsessions, and maybe it’s our exaggeration of the scenario as a whole. We aren’t really stalking, we are just curious, open-minded people who want answers to their questions.
Taking a leap backwards to Gen Z’s views of social media stalking, to a viewpoint saying it has been generally normalized with teens.
“It’s a given at this point that everyone stalks each other, and there just can’t be hard feelings,” Kiki Hoglen (11) said. “It’s weird because it’s 100% socially acceptable to stalk people, but at the same time it would be really embarrassing if the person found out.”
There’s an unspoken rule between most teenagers that they will be ‘stalked’ across all social media platforms, therefore everyone can do it, but neither party can find out, which makes it awkward when you accidentally like their first post from middle school.
“The last time I had an embarrassing stalking moment was when I liked my ex’s ex post on Instagram, so I immediately blocked her, ” an anonymous source said.
Honestly, when was the last time you had to delete your Instagram search history before someone typed in their “@”? Or even worse, did you forget to delete it, and they were in your search history when you were showing them something on your phone? It’s happened to the best of us.
“Legally, behavior only qualifies as stalking if it consists of a pattern of behavior across contexts and time, and if it is of a nature that it causes the target, the target’s family, or ‘a reasonable person’ some substantial degree of fear, stress, anxiety or a sense of terror,” Brian Spitzberg, the senate distinguished professor emeritus and co-founder for the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age at San Diego State University, said.
From a qualified perspective, there is quite a difference between the actual definition and legal term of stalking, and the overused common perception of it.
“However, everyday types of obsessive fan attempts at electronic contact with celebrities, surfing for others’ social media activity, using social media to keep tabs on someone, and persistent e-communications (texting, IMs, social media posts, etc.) are becoming so relatively common that many people have both accepted that others will engage in it, and that it is increasingly to be expected or normal to engage in,” Spitzberg said.
Stalking has become a very normalized term, confused with being nosy, and overly involved in someone’s internet life.
Ultimately, it may be more fitting to reconsider the term “stalking” when referring to checking up on someone’s socials or casually scrolling through someone’s account to find out more about them. This should not be considered stalking, perhaps just overly involving yourself in someone’s life. Although, that term isn’t much fun to use, is it?
“It’s fun to once in a while go down a rabbit hole of people’s pages, I always learn so much about others from just their social media,” Hoglen said.
