Peeping TOMfoolery online

Getting to know someone better or bonding over mutual interest — it’s all digital now. Rather than interacting organically and framing an impression that evolves through time, people prefer to get details online by going through and hovering over another’s social media accounts for hours. Sometimes, it is excessive and borderline stalker behaviour. So, where should one draw the line? How healthy is this obsession? We speak to city-based youngsters to find out where curiosity ends and stalking begins...

Yamini Shankar believes looking people up online is a safe zone for a lot of introverts. “People who have a hard time blending in or asking questions, find it easier to just gather information online,” shares the 22-year-old engineering student. “Being one myself, I would much rather go to someone’s profile and find out their birthday, than run the risk of seeming creepy by asking a person what’s their zodiac. Having said that, such people also don’t consciously realise when they are crossing the line,” she adds. According to her, the dependence on information derived online is too real; and rather convenient.

In an age where everybody and everything is accessible, books are being judged by their covers too. “I think social media has made us lazy,” believes Prithvi Shiv, a social media expert. “The profiles are superficial and should only serve maybe as an introduction to someone, but instead they’ve become the absolute guide to judging and knowing people. It’s also perhaps because we seem to have become so busy with everything that we rely on the convenience of social media profiling.” Prithvi believes that getting to know people is time-consuming which most people seem to have no desire for.

This constant obsession to know more about the people one is interested in, is not only time consuming, but incurable too. And most of the time, it’s a question of safety, for the person being “looked up”. City-based relations manager Sasha Martin has been on the receiving end of this unsolicited interest.  “Curiosity can’t last this long obviously, I assure you. When I was cyber stalked, the person wasn’t just obsessed but would invade in everything going on around me. Cyber stalking is such a trauma, and it can keep people away from real things like being on social media or interacting with different individuals who are actually harmless. It gets a lot worse, when you feel insecure in your own home, you start to doubt everyone around you, and one thing I’ve learnt from this is that, it never makes one stop and question oneself but gets consistent over time.”

While the intention might be pure and innocent, there’s no denying that keeping a tab on people’s life online is mildly stalker-like. Sociologist Anuradha M believes that the line separating curiosity and stalking might be fine, but definitely exists.

“People who spend a lot of time online may struggle to form real relationships, and become fixated with others,” she feels. No matter how tempting the urge to secretly know someone better might be, physical proximity helps one observe things you cannot find online, she believes. Like body language, for example, or tonal cues when a person speaks. People should realise that social media is just one of many things needed to know another person, and it isn’t the only tool one should rely on.