Click. Laura Norton scans a stranger’s photo album. Click. Santhoshi Doshi reads that one of her friends has changed jobs. Click. Ana Robic discovers that the classmates who annoyed her at school still hang out with one other.

The three women are peeping into Facebook pages of friends and strangers. They are Facebook snoops.

There’s nothing wrong with it — after all, those who post know that information is out there for all the world to see.

But checking out people online has a deliciously furtive feel.

“Snooping” means browsing the messages, pictures, and videos of people who don’t restrict their Facebook pages.

Just click and enjoy.

It’s easy to be nosy

“Snooping on Facebook is a result of the way the information is presented to us, the ease of access and the visual aspects of information,” said Jeff Ginger, a sociologist working on a study called “The Facebook Project.”

Anonymity, in other words, abets.

“It’s gossiping, but without any blame,” admitted snooper Santhoshi Doshi, a business intelligence expert in Mountain View, California, who likes to look at people’s wedding albums on Facebook. “You’re free to look at stuff that you generally might not look at.”

Snooping is so popular that there are more than 150 Facebook groups with names such as “I am a proud Facebook snooper,” “People who snoop on other people through Facebook,” and “I’m a Facebook snoop and not afraid to admit it!”

“Why did he friend his ex?”

Since people voluntarily upload their pictures, videos, and information, realizing that anyone can see, why does rolling through strangers’ pages seem slightly sleazy?

Sociologist Ginger says it’s because one can get information impossible or uncomfortable to get in person.

“If you ask someone if they’re dating in person, you unleash a whole barrage of implications. But if you look at this on Facebook, you answer your question without all of the fallout.”

And so, when Courtney Jones, a waitress from Norman, Oklahoma, is interested in a boy, her first step is to review his Facebook page.

“When I look at a page, I read into what is on there. Like if a guy is in a picture that alludes to something sexual with a girl, I assume that if they’re willing to be that open with their sexual life in front of the camera, I’m sure they’re willing to do more behind the camera,” she says.

Jones also snoops on behalf of her friends, especially when they start dating new people.

“I’ll go through his Facebook word for word, and see if he has anything I wouldn’t approve of. Pictures, wall-to-wall, everything. I gotta have my girls’ backs!”

Mirror, mirror on a Facebook wall

While it does seem that we snoop because we’re curious about those around us, it has more to do with our need to know ourselves, suggested Shanyang Zhao, a sociology professor at Temple University.

“Getting to know others is important for the purpose of getting to know ourselves, for others serve as a looking glass in which we see ourselves,” said Zhao, who specializes in Internet and human interaction.

Maybe this explains why Ana Robic, a foreign language student from Brussels, snoops on classmates who were mean to her in high school. Robic belongs to a 108-member Facebook group called “Facebook helps me spy on people I don’t like.” Said Robic: “I look for something that shows me that I have a better life, so that I can say, ‘I don’t like you and look, I’m better than you are!’”

Zeeshahn Zafar, a public relations manager from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, snoops to gauge her popularity — or lack thereof.
“I read messages that other people have posted on that person’s wall. If a person has not replied to my messages, I check to see whether he or she has replied to other people’s messages.”

If you’re ignoring someone on Facebook, then you’d better have a good excuse.

“You look familiar”

Zhao argued that Facebook snooping will make communication more subtle, sophisticated, stylish, and “further differentiated based on personality, age, education, class, among other things.” But he also acknowledged that it keeps people from talking — or gossiping — with each other as much.

“I don’t talk on the phone as much as I used to with my friends,” Norton agreed. “And even when we do talk, I might say something and my friend will talk about how she knew about it through Facebook. It’s pretty ridiculous.”

There’s also such a thing as too much information.

“I sometimes meet new people at a party, maybe friends of a friend, and they seem familiar,” Doshi said. “And then I realize that I’d snooped on them through a friend’s Facebook page. I have to bite my tongue to keep myself from blurting that out.”

In The Fray Contributor

In the fall of 2002, I was teaching third grade at an independent, coeducational elementary and middle school in Manhattan. As October rolled by, I asked a student what he was going to be for Halloween.

“I’m going as an Indian,” he said, excitedly. He seemed to be looking forward to the upcoming candy fest. But to me, his response was a flag — a big red flag with “teachable moment” written all over it.

Zoom ahead several years to a graduate-level class about “otherness” at the New School for Social Research in New York. One Monday evening, our discussion turned to multiculturalism, terminology, and political correctness in schools. The question on the horseshoe-shaped table was does the term “multicultural” actually impede our ability to connect with “the other” in our lives?

As a teacher-turned-graduate student, I listened intently to my classmates sound off on the hot button issues: multiculturalism is inappropriately associated with racial diversity, given the fact that the two are very different concepts. “Diversity Day” and “Multicultural Month” too neatly divide from the rest of a classroom’s curriculum the fact of diversity. Schools should abolish programs devoted to multicultural awareness and instead, simply be diverse institutions. Terms used in schools should reflect the latest in social thought, otherwise how can we raise kids who will become conscious and sensitive adults?

When I became a schoolteacher in 2001, multiculturalism and diversity curricula were considered good things. Multicultural activities and books were part of the curriculum. Diversity coordinators were being hired in many of the private schools, and teachers were applying to attend national conferences on diversity. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) offered Diversity Leadership Awards each year.

But now, in graduate school, I listened to my classmates (much younger than me, just out of college, and with no teaching experience) and wondered about their thoughts. I didn’t necessarily disagree with them. My classmates, however, were demonstrating a typical problem. In graduate school classrooms, think tanks, non-profit organizations, and government offices, issues like diversity in schools are debated all the time. New terminology replaces the old, things become politically correct or incorrect, theorists publish controversial articles, minority group representatives speak about rights on the evening news, and social movements sweep along. We adults absorb the latest in what we should and should not to say.

Teachers try to stay updated. But could I have kept my eight-year-old students aware of the changing thought about, say, the issue of how to refer to American Indians? Aware enough so that in that one moment in time — the Halloween costume remark — we all would spew the most fashionable term?

A glimpse into the classroom

Though private and public efforts to jazz up schools do make a difference in keeping classrooms and curricula up-to-date, many classrooms — and I’ll speak only of my experience in two Manhattan private schools here — are a little bit like museums of childhood. Mine certainly were. It starts with the stuff you can still find in classrooms. A tinkerer like me might like to grind the old pencil sharpener, with lead marks dating back forty years. (We had an electric sharpener, too, but it broke far more often than the grinder type did). A book collector could pore over yellowed copies of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Winnie-the-Pooh. Who can deny the charm of framed children’s drawings whose creators are now middle-aged?

Then again, picture the classroom as a landfill. Many classrooms are stuffed with musty piles of papers. Chipped paint reveals layers of unfashionable color choices, as if you could peel back each one and reveal the philosophy of the day on the walls. If you hunt, you can still find a slide rule or a USSR picture book. Some classrooms are just not cutting edge, regardless of what the admissions brochures say. Ideas and the materials used to teach them, for better or worse, tend to endure through generations.

The age of things extends to ideas, of course. Lesson plans that worked are recopied, while lesson plans that didn’t are filed into three-ring binders and kept for reference. If there’s a binder for “Diversity Day,” it gets recycled year after year. My classroom was chock-full of evidence of the greatest ongoing education experiment: trial and error. Like a museum (or a garbage dump), a classroom encapsulates nuggets of human thought.

It’s not that the curriculum is totally immune to the changes “out there.” In fact, like vaults run by pack rats, classrooms serve as the perfect repository for the ideological debris of political campaigns and social movements. What starts as dialogue or dissent in think tanks and graduate classrooms is inevitably dumped into teachers’ laps along with the immediate events of the day. Teachers must marry the politically correct, culturally sensitive world with the violent, offensive world, and translate the result into a civically and environmentally responsible yet age-appropriate curriculum.

Consider the teacher’s task after hurricane Katrina, or during last fall’s election, when Martin Luther King’s image could be viewed regularly on the news and the name Lincoln was dropped into more conversations than I can recall in recent history. Consider the teacher’s task on September 11, 2001. That, in fact, was my fourth day of teaching: streams of soot-covered office workers filing past the school, panicked parents trying to push their way upstairs to collect their kids and take them home, the head of my division explaining to students that “bad things happened to America today, but you are all safe.”

Again and again, new worksheets are created, new lesson plans put into place, new safety plans written, new “current events” times carved into the school day.

The questions at hand

So when my student said, “I’m going as an Indian,” what should I have done? My graduate classmates might have offered multiple choices: Remind him that a recent trend is to use the term “Native American”; explain that an even more recent trend is a backlash against the label “Native American,” against labeling at all; tell the boy he ought to use the officially recognized term “American Indian,” but compliment him for getting it close; use the moment to explain that dressing up for Halloween as an ethnic or racial identity instead of as a mouse or a pumpkin could be considered offensive, because reducing said identity to costume pieces perpetuates negative stereotypes. I did work through several options in that moment in 2002, but by the time I was ready with a response, the boy was long gone, off to the book nook where, I can imagine now, he pulled The Indian in the Cupboard from the shelf.

But I was new to teaching then. I have quicker reflexes now.

What am I getting at? Something I wish I had gotten at with my graduate classmates. That teaching is already a difficult job. Keeping eight-year-olds up-to-date on the political and social changes in our world, contextualizing those changes for them from the previous status quo, as politically incorrect as it may have been, and creating anew each day a curriculum that matches the latest in current events? We do our best.

I sat down with two teaching buddies who still work with the elementary school set and asked them about politically correct terminology. I’ll call them Scott and Amanda. Both work in private schools in Manhattan, both have graduate degrees in the field of education, and both were eager to discuss how, as teachers, they handle changing thought on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

“Would it faze you if a child said, ‘I’m going to be an Indian for Halloween’?”

“Deep inside, I’m feeling, uh-oh. This could end up being very stereotypical,” said Scott. “It raises questions of what representations on Halloween are inappropriate.”

Scott’s school allows costumes on Halloween, though within reason. Students are sometimes pulled aside and asked to alter details of their dress — I remember the debate over a fake cigar, complete with burning end, one year. Amanda’s school has a no-costume policy, though parents provide candy parties in the decorated classrooms.

“I think I would ask the student about his costume,” said Amanda. “Like, what are the things we learned about Native Americans that you incorporated into your costume?”

“So a gentle change of term?” I asked.

“I actually use the terms ‘Native American’ and ‘Indian’ interchangeably,” said Scott. “I think it’s important to understand the history of the words.”

In the moment the student told me he was “going as an Indian,” I didn’t know the history of the words, nor was I up-to-date on the latest best term choice. So I did what I always tell my students to do: I researched.

A brief history of names

It appears that when Christopher Columbus hit land and was hit with the urge to do what all explorers do — name things — he might have had one of two thoughts. Either he rejoiced, “We made it to the East Indies, or India, or somewhere over yonder! Check out the Indians!” (Sarcasm mine.) Or, improbably, he mused, “These spiritual people are with God, with Dios.” That seems like a long shot to me, and I could not find any sources to back it up save for some hobby historians writing about it on the Internet.

Either way, or for some other reason that never seems to have made it into our history books, the label “Indios,” and then “Indian,” was attached to Seminole, Pequot, and Sioux alike. “Indian” became the catchall word for anyone explorers and settlers met along their journey. It gained recognition worldwide, and some languages even adopted new words to differentiate between Indians of the Americas and Indians of India.

Then came the 1960s. Indians, along with non-Indian supporters, voiced objections to the term they’d been labeled with for centuries. Aside from the fact that it could have been a colossal geographical mistake by Columbus, the term “Indian” had become a bit of a joke. The dawn of film and cheap plastic toys had given Indians a bad name. Cowboys and Indians were so strongly made representative of good and evil, civilization and savagery, respectively, that many people believed the only way to erase the stereotype was to erase the name.

Thus Indians were reborn again, this time as “Native Americans.” “Native” because their ancestors were here before anyone else, and “American” for obvious reasons. Sensitive anthropologists informed the government of this new label, and the government promptly absorbed it into its classification system.

The term “Native American,” however, provoked some questions of logic. What makes a person native? Birth? If so, there’s a whole bunch of us in a big happy native, if not Native American, family. And “American,” like “Indian” before it, supplanted the beloved tribal names that existed long before Vespucci did.

By the 1980s, many acknowledged they preferred the old way. But the term “Native American” has nonetheless stuck around, to the dismay of some. Comic George Carlin bites at the “pussified, trendy bullshit phrase.” Cherokee writer Christina Berry requests that “Indian” be used but with contextual sensitivity (avoid the worst: “Injun” and “redskin”). Lakota activist Russell Means wants his people to call themselves “any damn thing we choose” and refuses to be classified as “Native American.”

In addition to “Native American,” the vast machinery of label production has spit out “Original Americans,” “Indigenous Americans,” “Amerindians,” “First Americans,” “First Nations,” and “Aboriginal Peoples,” to name but a few. The vast machinery of academic and activist opposition has spit back a reproach for each one, though you can’t completely fault those who try out “Native American Indian” or “Aboriginal American Natives” in a misguided attempt to get it right at both ends.

The U.S. government officially uses the term “American Indian,” while the Canadian government has adopted the term “First Nations” in place of “Indian” and lists the name under the umbrella term “Aboriginals.” The term “Indigenous Peoples” encompasses a wide range of tribes in Mexico and Central and South America.

When I sort through the often contradictory materials, the phrase that comes to my mind is political scientist Walter Connor’s “terminological chaos.” And this chaos is faithfully documented by the caretakers of education, in the filing cabinets and on the bookshelves of American classrooms.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom

Both Scott and Amanda teach social studies curricula that rely heavily on the heritage of the American Indians. November is both National American Indian Month and Alaska Native Heritage Month, and much of the commemorative excitement plays out in their classrooms. Scott’s school invites the Red Hawk Council Dancers every year, who, if I remember correctly, explain to students that what they have seen of American Indians in the movies isn’t always true. Scott also takes his students to the Museum of the American Indian. They don’t know the museum is one among many getting heat for not returning Indian artifacts to the tribes who claim them.

A bulletin board announces “Native Americans!” in bright red punch-out letters and is tacked full of “indigenous artwork.” I remember devoting a stretch of wall to the “False Face Society,” lined with Iroquois-inspired masks made of paper and markers, only to learn that I may have been making a major cultural intrusion by allowing my students to create their own false faces. For a long time, I reminded my students to walk “Indian file” (one behind the other) and sit “Indian style” (knees bent, legs cross), because I had grown up with these terms. I grew out of them, however, and started to say simply “single-file” and “cross-legged.”

Amanda reads The Indian in the Cupboard to her students.

“Do you adjust the term as you read?” I asked.

“No. The books are dated and are still in the classrooms,” said Amanda. “People don’t get brand new materials with the latest political material in them. They’re not interested in the idea that there’s a controversy over a name.”

Amanda said that even in middle school history classrooms, where her husband teaches, “Half the books say one thing, half the books say the other.”

There are a few resources a teacher might use to make sense of the terminological changes for his or her students. In 2002, a book called Contentious Issues by Márianna Csóti appeared in the United States. It’s a book about big ideas for little kids, as the title suggests. One section of this stereotype-destruction manual reads like a laundry list of terms you can use to get beat up at a bar: “Paddy, Paki, Sambo, Spade, Spick/spic, Spook, Taffy, Wog, Wop.” What comes between “Paki” and “Sambo” is “Red Indian,” an archaic British phrase that is still used by some to distinguish between American Indians and Indians from India. Many condemn the term as disparaging on the basis of race, and others wonder why black and white remained okay whereas red and yellow fell into disrepute. Csóti encourages adults to be clear with children about terms. “Red Indian” is racist, “Indian” is politically incorrect, “Native American” is “not wholly acceptable,” and the child’s best bet is to go with “Indigenous.”

I can only imagine what reaction the book would receive in my graduate school classrooms. Outrageously offensive? Possibly harmful, feeding the fire by putting words in kids’ mouths? Perpetuating a classroom environment in which difference is too starkly highlighted? Politically incorrect?

To me, it’s a saving grace kind of book, something to help put all the rapidly changing thought into one place. I asked my teaching friends about it.

“I have an increasing apathy toward political correctness,” Scott told me. “There’s always something new. I want to understand and be compassionate and considerate, but in the end, it’s about the values you project as a teacher.”

Scott was faced with a teachable moment himself when reading Runaway to Freedom by Barbara Smucker with his students.

“The book used ‘nigger’ quite often,” Scott said.

Runaway to Freedom is a historical fiction novel geared toward kids in the nine- to twelve-years category, and it reveals, in context, how the word “nigger” was used in the nineteenth century.

Scott continued. “I asked my students, ‘Do you all feel comfortable going on with this? We have until tomorrow to decide if we’re all comfortable. Go home and talk about it. If anyone has any concerns, let me know.’ I checked in with the administrator, too.”

In the end, Scott’s administrator approved, and his students decided it was okay, that they would learn about the word in context.

“I was actually really moved by the book, but it was hard to read,” said Scott. “We agreed we wouldn’t actually say the word, we would just say ‘N.’ The kids took it very seriously.”

“It’s about teachers with good intentions who want to do the right thing,” said Amanda. “You can’t shield students from the idea that bad words exist, or that there are really ugly moments in American history.”

“In the end, the lessons you’re teaching — about different cultures and the history of a place — are about understanding the humanness of things,” she added. “They’re about building understanding for otherness.”

As I jumped from one man to the next, the end result was always the same. I’d settle into a relationship, only to be left feeling trapped and imprisoned by my partner. I would always end up looking for an escape, a means to bail out of what was otherwise a seemingly happy and healthy relationship. Craving my freedom and the world of possibilities outside of the union, I would fashion a mental prison from which I’d flee to singlehood with reckless abandon.

Perhaps I wasn’t meant to settle down. I’ve bailed out of every major relationship in my life after feeling smothered, sacrificing any future the relationship had.

But then, how is it that I ended up with this rock on my finger?

My constant musings about freedom and my lack thereof left my live-in boyfriend, a finance professional, with feelings of instability. Every other weekend I announced wanting to split, until I finally did so in dramatic fashion. This scene played over and over again, as I left a small army of broken men scattered across the globe.

These haven’t been unhappy relationships by any means. The men have been considerate, loving, genuine, and romantic. They’ve offered me the world and then some. But something within me always shouted, “Run! Get Out!” I’ve tried to quiet this inner voice over the years, with little success.

I’d find ways to ease my escape. I’d nitpick at his habits and perceived flaws until he’d almost beg me to leave. Oh, the egos I have crushed.

I had incessant nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat with images of white dresses and babies fresh in my mind. As I escaped to the next room to lie alone and contemplate in solitude, I’d feel a rush of relief as I left his side. His mere presence gave me anxiety.

To what can I attribute this fear of relationships? My parents have been happily married for 32 years, though they might argue about the “happily” part. All my aunts and uncles married their high school sweethearts, forming a 12-person coalition of long-term love advocates. With not a divorce in my family tree, where did this fear that gripped me so powerfully come from?

Some pointed to a fear of intimacy, while others explained my trepidation as a manifestation of my own discomfort with the idea of marriage. For years I took solace in the male propaganda that monogamy was an unnatural state. My beer-swigging buddies pointed to examples in the animal kingdom, and I wholeheartedly agreed, as did my female friends.

But as I grew older, those women shed their roaming tendencies and donned the gown in all its traditionally assigned glory. I watched these friends marry off, headed to the no-man’s-land of married folks, and I wondered, “Is there something wrong with me? Why do I always bail? Why can’t I stick around for the long-term love?”

Just as I jumped from place to place during my twenties, I jumped from man to man. In the same way I’d feel the need to go as soon as I became comfortable in a locale, I’d let my instinct for freedom take over as soon as I saw a future with a man.

Like a child who assumes that the world rides ponies and eats cake while in bed, I couldn’t help but wonder: Isn’t there something better?

And then I met *Kevin. He was everything I didn’t want in a man: blue-collar, simple, and incredibly masculine. But he fell for me and professed his love, to which I responded with utter horror. I shot him down instantly, wounding his confidence, no doubt.

But as we continued to spend time together as friends, I noticed something quite profound. He didn’t want to keep me from exploring or from seeking my freedom — he wanted to watch me do so. He pushed me to leave a career that I hated to pursue my love of writing. He encouraged me to head off on solo vacations and volunteer missions. Eventually his kind spirit and nonthreatening demeanor won me over, and we began to date.

Now I’d like to say that once I met him, my thoughts of imprisonment evaporated. But they were still present, and I voiced them liberally. I’d tell him I was leaving him, off to Japan to teach or to the District of Columbia to volunteer. And he’d calmly nod his head and proclaim he’d wait for my return.

Where all the other men had fought me, he agreed to give me my freedom.

All the men in my past had wanted to make a housewife out of me, to restrain me from all the world had to offer. In this new one, I found someone who took pleasure in watching me take on the possibilities and potential of my future.

Now we have made a home together, and he proposed this past Christmas Eve. For 10 years, commitment was a four-letter word.

But now the weight of those prison bars has been lifted.

*The name has been changed for this story.

Related: Victoria Witchey

In The Fray Contributor