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Cyber peeking: Nowadays, it's harder than ever to escape from your past relationships
(Sacramento Bee, The (CA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 27--Want to slip away from old friends and acquaintances? It won't be easy. No one ever completely exits your life anymore.
Call it "cyber-peeking": With a few taps on a keyboard and a search engine such as Google, you can find ex-friends and lost loves again in seconds, secretly checking out their current job or their relationship status.
Or maybe they're spying on you. Everyone seems to be doing it.
"Everyone you've ever met is now rather fewer steps away, and we are all tempted to try and find out what happened to that person," said John Calder, an analyst at Social Technologies, which tracks consumer trends for Fortune 500 companies and large nonprofits. "Everything, including people's lives, is becoming more transparent. It is steadily becoming easier to find out any given piece of information, even personal details about a person's life."
Although it's hard to track just how many people are in the habit of checking up on others, the increasing popularity of social networking sites indicates that people are insatiably curious about their old friends. Classmates.com has 40 million registered members, and Reunion.com has 23 million. Younger Internet users log onto Facebook.com, which has 7.6 million members, and MySpace.com, which has more than 70 million.
"That the verb to 'Google' someone (exists) is all the proof we need that it's becoming more common," Calder said.
Sites such as AnyWho.com or Switchboard.com are also popular for searches. And using Google's satellite map, people can even zoom in on images of neighborhoods.
Finding out if old friends achieved that career they always talked about is easy enough, with Web sites such as ZoomInfo.com. It rounds up the professional details published about a person on the Internet and compiles them into a resume format.
"It's sort of that old concept of six degrees of separation," said Kevin Wehr, a sociology professor at California State University, Sacramento. "The Internet allows us easier access to those six degrees. It allows us to break down that social distance so that we can keep people closer."
Wondering what happened to your old classmates isn't anything new, but in the past, "that's pretty much where things stopped," said Bob Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. "You wondered it and then went back to your business."
Knowing the details of someone's life without getting in touch with them feels a little creepy, mostly because the only way to find out information about someone used to involve a good library or maybe even a private detective, "which would be kind of crazy," Thompson said.
The things that would have required weeks of snail mail and research to uncover can now be found in 10 minutes and often for free.
"The information is out there; you can't really blame someone for getting enough information about anything," Thompson said, although he admits that "it's creepy if they're doing it about you."
Whether you know it or not, you're leaving a trail, especially those who frequently use social networking or photo-sharing sites.
"We've yet to quite realize that there is so much information that someone who does a thorough search on you really does get to levels that are a little uncomfortable for some people," Thompson said.
So why are we compelled to look up people we used to know?
"Because it's like reading a novel," said Robb Hecht, a business blogger for PR Machine. "A nonfiction story folds out right before your eyes online."
Nostalgia is probably the main reason that compels people to look up old classmates, said Wehr. He adds that although many Americans have little interest in history, they're fascinated by the characters in their own pasts.
Often, it's about comparing your life with those in your past, especially the people you grew up with, said Nancy Kalish, a sociology professor at California State University, Sacramento, who lends her expertise to Reunion.com.
"What you really want to know is how well you do in relationship to others, ranking who came out on top and so forth," said Greg Niemeyer, an assistant professor of new media at UC Berkeley.
And for those who weren't so nice to you, "what you hope to do is Google their names and find out they're living a horrible life," Thompson said.
But sometimes, seeing how an acquaintance's life turned out is nothing more than an interesting way to waste a couple of minutes.
"In those bored moments, (when) you're not supposed to quit work yet and you're still logged onto the computer," Thompson said, "those are the vulnerable times where you type in your old friends' names."
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