Are you a stalker?

I'm going to admit this now, I am an internet creeper/stalker, whatever you wanna call it. I have a facebook, myspace and now a twitter - 2 blogs and I even find myself looking through the forums on Craigslist when the mood strikes. I read at least 10 blogs a week and most are people that I know personally. I have 280 facebook friends and 99 myspace friends. I don't use AIM anymore, just Myspace IM and its mostly to talk to Andrew and a few friends that live out of state. But I am addicted to facebook; I think many of my friends are too.

I get on there randomly throughout the day, look at peoples status, check to see if people posted photos, update their profile, whatever and the more I think about it the more disturbed I become by what I am doing. I too post my whole life on that site (granted my profile is private and I recently went through and weeded out a majority of my friends). But now all my cousins are on facebook, some of my parents friends and yes, my mother has asked me to make her one as well as my dad.

I'm to the point where I wonder if I should be filtering what I put on there. People try to tell you that employers get on there looking for you, well duh, make your stuff private and if you don't want to be friends with someone then say no, I don't have pictures of myself plastered everywhere half naked and drunk or anything, but I'm 24 if I am holding a beer in a picture I really don't care. I don't know that I believe cops bust kids for underage drinking via facebook either, I mean really, its probably just a scare tactic, but at the same time if you're going to do something stupid and plaster it on the internet (no matter what site its on) you're probably going to get caught eventually.

But the real question here is, why do we really care what other people are doing? Does it matter that they are at work till 4 then going to the gym? We are the same way about people we don't even know, we stalk celebrities through the prying eyes of the paparazzi everyday via E! and US Weekly and its basically the same thing, only these are people we know, some that we call our friends and family and we want to know where they are and what they are doing every minute of everyday!

So are you a stalker too? I know I can't be the only one.....why do you think we are so fascinated by what other people are doing?