It's two o' clock in the morning, and you have a paper due at 8 a.m. in your Modern Western Civilization class. You've been working on this paper for hours on end, and you decide to take a break and open up Facebook. Suddenly, a quick notification check turns into a two-hour long lurk session.
"Lurking" has become the newest method of wasting time for college students. A lurker is defined as "a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chat room, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively."
Everyone does it at one point or another. You can deny it as much as you want, but at some point in your college career, you're going to do it. There are different degrees of lurking; some people do it all the time, and some do it periodically or only when "necessary." Spending lots of time on the computer or in your dorm room generally directly correlates to the amount of time you spend lurking.
Though the aforementioned definition doesn't include it, the most common lurking that occurs in college dorm rooms is via Facebook or MySpace. Lurkers, which mostly seem to be young women, typically lurk the profiles of their boyfriends, their boyfriend's ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, their ex-boyfriends' new girlfriends, etc. It's a vicious cycle that can go on for hours. It's having the will to stop that's the hard part.
Most people will laugh and deny that they lurk if you ask them; they're usually unaware of the fact that they do it, or how much time they tend to dedicate to it. Facebook makes it ridiculously easy to lurk. Your newsfeed includes several updates pertaining to who added who, who wrote on whose wall, and new pictures that people have added or were tagged in. The homepage is one of the main ways someone could launch into a lurk session. You see a new picture that one of your friends uploaded, you click on it, you notice that your ex-boyfriend is tagged in it, and then you click on his name, which brings you to his profile.
Just like good ol' MySpace, a Facebook page could be public or private. The determination of which one it is could greatly decrease or increase your lurking abilities. If a profile is private, your lurking generally stops there. If it's public, you've entered a wonderland of information concerning who that person is talking to, what they've done recently in their social life, and tons and tons of more information.
This is not okay. This is the equivalent of looking through your boyfriend's phone when he's not looking. Not to mention, if you're lurking your ex-boyfriend's Facebook two months after you two have broken up, you've got some serious detachment issues that you have to deal with away from the computer.
Lurking has endless negative effects. For example, say you found out your ex-boyfriend is dating someone new. From the several young ladies I have asked about lurking, this is one of the most common situations that prompt lurking. You're libel to spend unnecessary time comparing yourself to her or finding information about their relationship that you don't want to know about. Maybe he takes her to the same restaurants that you two used to go to or calls her the same pet names he used to call you. Discoveries like that can cause a lot of heartache, but only if you let yourself uncover them.
Straying away from lurking is not as dissimilar as getting over an ex-boyfriend. The number one key is to stay busy. And, when you do come across that tagged picture or a wall post they left on a friend's wall, let it go. It's just like when you see an ex at the mall; keep walking. If it gets severe enough, just block whoever you can't stop lurking. This way, you can't see them and they can't see you. This is only if you entirely intend to never communicate with them again via Facebook.
The main component is that this cycle is unhealthy. Many of the girls I talked to said that once you visit someone's page whose life you have a vested interest in, you return to their page more often in order to keep up with what they're doing. This is a very difficult cycle to break, but if you could just step away from yourself and look at your behavior, you'd realize it's detrimental to your mental well-being and honestly pretty pathetic.
Lurking causes pointless anxiety and sadness to lots of young girls. It seems like a stupid problem, just something that some people do when they're bored, but it can cause some serious grief. Rise above lurking; find healthy alternatives when surfing the Web.
