When you meet a new person, you may not be meeting them at all.
You might have seen them on our news feeds on Facebook, as friends-of-friends-of-friends. Taking advantage of this small degree of connection, you might have clicked on their profile page and viewed his or her profile pictures and albums, depending on the level of privacy afforded to their page, and gotten an idea of a person’s appearance and hobbies. We might have noted his or her political and religious views, or perused their interests, noting shared ideologies, TV show preferences or musical tastes. You might have taken a look at their wall, and seen the way this person interacts with others—the kinds of conversations he or she is interested in having, or is fascinated by.
From this so-called “Facebook stalking,” you can move on to other modes of profiling. You can check if this person has a public Twitter—by simply searching for his or her name—and further peruse his or her interests, opinions and connections through those quick 140-character tweets. You can gauge the exact location of this person and his or her specific engagements at every moment he or she chooses to update.
You can read about the semester of service he or she did in Africa, helping increase medical technology care in an AIDS-stricken community. You can read about his or her drunken, party-filled summer in Europe, full of club and bar-hopping and steamy nights with a significant other. You may even be able to see photos of each respective experience. You can watch YouTube videos of them playing piano concerts, giving hilarious comedic advice or singing spectacularly—you can even watch videos of them doing these things quite badly.
Moreover, you can Google this individual. You can find their most significant achievements spanning from elementary school to college to where they are now—competitions won, jobs obtained presently and formerly, successful art projects and essays, championship racing times, news articles, websites and blogs, even comments and different engagements with various peoples and mediums.
From Facebook , Twitter and Google, you have already seen multiple ways of obtaining significant information about an individual. Indeed, using these sites, you may even be able to obtain concrete information that allows us to contact this person in a personal manner. Facebook and Twitter often list links to other websites and blogs, emails, phone numbers and mailing addresses. Increasingly complicated and constantly changing privacy settings make it such that the person may not even realize that their phone number is on display for the world to see.
And from this—even without meeting that individual—you begin to form a judgment, a solid vision of the personality of that person.
You can begin to envision his or her thoughts or opinions on an idea or topic—whether intellectual and social. From simply viewing of that person’s Facebook or Twitter, you can already imagine the types of conversations you could have with him or her, and the responses that would come to the challenges or questions you would present about a variety of issues.
You can imagine that this means an actual meeting with this individual could be quite awkward.
You can’t tell a person you meet “Hi, I’ve read about you and know a lot about you, but I am finally meeting you face-to-face,” even though that may very well be the truth. It’s considered creepy. The person will forever view you as a creeper, even though he or she may admit to doing the same thing And yet, in this day and age where you can know an astounding amount of information about an individual, it may become the norm. Our initial meetings with people, first impressions, are all skewed because of the degree of information available on the internet—that any member of the public may very well see.
Either a more significant interest in privatization of information is necessary—or we need to embrace that, with the degree of social engagement the internet makes possible, the face of meetings and initial impressions is changing. If not, we will only continue to lie to ourselves about our “first” impressions of people.
Indu Ramesh is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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