Stalking

There's a new phenomenon emerging as the use of online journals become more and more widespread. It is great and convenient to record the great events of your life for your friends while attracting new people with similar interests.

At the same time it creates an easy access to details that you normally don't have access to. So a stranger may show up one day knowing more about you than your best friend. It is also the perfect breeding ground for stalkers.

A stalker is often created after you deny someone of something. Most often “love” will create such stalker. I believe that repetitive exposure to certain thing will make that certain thing important to the person. Just like saying “shit” all the time will just make that habit even worse as time goes on, until one day you realize that you can't get it out of your vocabulary. This type of behavior, the feedback loop, exists everywhere in nature. Once you've reached a tipping point it is hard to turn back unless you encounter a similarly strong force. Take the island of Micronesia for example. This island started out peaceful and value harmony higher than anything else, yet they have a suicide rate of 0.25% amongst their youths, twice as high as that of the states. It all started with a romantic story where 2 youth committed suicide in a noble act. That one initial action made the rest more susceptible to the same act until it is committed often enough that it became acceptable as a form of solving problems.

Let’s get back to the topic of online journal creating stalkers. Say the person is denied this access to you, but knows that you have a journal online. It's as easy as 1 click for that person to access your most intimate thoughts. Once that act is committed, it takes a person of iron grip on their own emotions to stop repeating something as easy as 1 click of the mouse, especially when that action is driven by the 2 most fundamental emotions of human nature: love and jealousy.

All is fine and dandy until that 1 click becomes 1 every week, then 1 every day until you constantly click on it as a reflex when you are online.

I've come to the conclusion that things become important to a person emotionally not because it has great value or because it's wonderful. They are important because of how much time and exposure the person has to it. For a more conscious way of living, it is important for us to do a complete and thorough examination of value and decide at initial contact to have more or less exposure.