On July 14, two Dartmouth students arrested on drug-related charges were referred to by name in an article published in The Dartmouth. When a crime of this sort and magnitude is reported, it is standard procedure to include as many relevant details as are available; such routine is expected. The article's content itself, therefore, was not what alarmed me. What bothered me was what I predicted would follow the break of this news.
I imagined the play-by-play account reported in the article flashing up on computer screens across campus as people forwarded the piece to their friends. I imagined students immediately searching Facebook for a visual of the students involved. I imagined there would even be Google searches for the more eager researchers among us.
The main cause of my discomfort was the unlikelihood that the arrested students could remain anonymous to those on campus who had not known either of them prior to the article's release. Due to the rise of such social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter and the growing amount of information available on the Internet personal information is increasingly difficult to keep private.
This evolving invasive culture is most likely more prevalent in your life than you even realize. It's "Facebook stalking" someone you met in the basement. It's Googling names of strangers in hopes of finding out more information. It's knowing to put those names in quotations. It's realizing how to modify searches to fit exactly what or whom you are searching for. And these procedures are no longer taboo. This is slowly becoming our norm.
Unnatural interest in the private business of others has often been a part of society. We have not necessarily become nosier we just have more tools to carry out our investigations. It is possible now to decide if a Saturday night hook-up is worth pursuing simply by reading what they listed under the "Interest" section on their Facebook profile. With the assistance of the DND and profile pictures, you can determine the actual name of someone you met without ever having to admit you forgot.
And while figuring out someone's name or checking to see if you have mutual friends is harmless, the level at which we participate in this activity has made it normal for us to automatically look up the names of the students who were arrested last Friday. And while perhaps this was only to find out if you have had a class together, it is direct evidence of a new sense of entitlement our generation feels about the right to know more than we ought to about the people around us.
With the privacy settings offered by such sites, one can argue that students have sufficient control over how much information is made public. Although this is true, that one would have to prevent other students from learning certain personal information through means other than direct interaction is proof of just how far this culture has expanded.
This new standard lowers our expected level of privacy. A couple of years ago it was taboo to admit knowing' someone exclusively through Facebook. Today, admitting you facebook stalked' a fellow classmate, or even a stranger with whom you have mutual friends, is nothing out of the ordinary. A couple of weeks ago, I introduced two friends to each other. One turned to the other, repeated his name a couple of times and then said, "Nope, I don't have you on Facebook." I myself am even guilty of making these activities the new norm,' and I probably would not know my friends' birthdays without their Facebook profiles.
I am not arguing for a stricter control of information; that option is already available. I am arguing for a change in how culturally acceptable it is to use these tools to find information about people we barely know. The more attached we become to our virtual world and the more times we mention a fact gathered via a networking tool in lieu of a personal encounter, the more removed from reality and normal social standards we will be.
If you haven't done so already, do a quick search of your own name in Google. It may provide insight into exactly how much a complete stranger could know about your life. That so much information is so readily available should scare us into making an effort to put an end to our nosy nature.