“Oh, him. Look over there.”

“That guy? Nice try. I’m friends with him on Facebook. He’s dating someone.”

It’s a Thursday night in March, during my senior year in college, two weeks before finals and the 7-day holiday known as Spring Break. I’m with Melanie, my wing girl and roommate, at a local campus bar, which is packed to maximum capacity with hoards of young twenty-somethings.

We successfully break through the first wave of our sexually-hungry peers, nudging our way slowly but surely to the front of the bar. We order our first round of drinks and take a step back and analyze the scene. After almost four years in college, we recognize most of the faces through classes, mutual friends, and Facebook.

Originally intended for college students, Facebook, the social networking site created by Mark Zuckerberg, is now open to everyone and currently has over sixty million members. According to its website, Facebook is a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.” The term Facebook is now a verb, used in sentences like “Facebook me later!”

It’s rare to meet someone who doesn’t have a Facebook profile page. Your mom or that nosy neighbor down the street may have one. After a few clicks of the mouse, it becomes all-too-easy to unconsciously act as stalkers through Facebook, whether intended or not. Its advancements have piqued members’ curiosity of people, whom they may or may not know.

In a way, Facebook serves as a phone book with basic contact information, a resumé with friends’ employment updates, a second-chance by regulating zero percent of the truth of any information posted, and a dating service in the way members can pick and choose who they think they would like to get to know better based off profile pages.

Caitlin Dunn, a senior finance major at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, says that without Facebook, she suspects she would have met more guys throughout her college career based on genuine interests and things in common. Santa Clara University, a school of about 8,200 students, is a relatively small private religious school. With roughly 2,050 students in her graduating class, Dunn says Facebook had made a small campus seem even smaller.

“It makes it too easy to sit at home and stalk people as opposed to going out and meeting these people in real life,” she says. “It is hard to meet more guys, because everyone is inside, dating and judging through their computer.”

A few minutes go by as Melanie and I make small talk, hoping to look enthralled with one another but discreetly scanning the crowd.

“Okay. Look to the left,” she says.

I expertly shift my body towards the commanded direction, subtly searching the room.

“Oh. No, he’s got a girlfriend,” I pause, waiting for her face to suggest a defeated reaction. She does for a minute, and then smiles at a vaguely familiar guy across the room. I rack my brain trying to remember how I know him, and then it hits me: I don’t. I know his name, though. I know where he’s from. I even know that he prefers country over hip hop.

When we have the option of checking out other people’s profiles and pictures, their interests, hobbies, and entire circle of friends, the alluring mystery of dating is interrupted. If we have previous knowledge of one’s life, when we meet them it is too easy to create an image of our own parallel to theirs, hoping for approval and similarities. The spontaneity is stripped of dating when we know prior to the first encounter intimate details of a person’s life.

Break ups are excruciatingly dragged out when your former flame is constantly popping up on your news feed. Moving on from a former relationship can be a difficult thing, especially when Facebook alerts you with the whereabouts of your ex. Suspicions can be aroused and accusations claimed when one person in a relationship can’t help but notice the Facebook flirtation their significant other is participating in with a stranger. The phrase “seeing is believing” supports this rationale, giving the accuser visual evidence and a legitimate defense to support their jealousy. The saying “out of sight, out of mind” is overruled when Facebook is in the picture.

“It makes it too hard to forget a past relationship when you can see pictures of your ex with his new fling, especially when you go to a school as small as I do,” says Dunn.

The one advantage is when you catch someone in a lie, and use Facebook to figure out what they have been up to, where they have been, and whom with. All of this can be found really easily through pictures posted, conversations through wall posts, and status updates.

Images and accompanying text are chosen on a Facebook page to suit a preferred appearance, and that may not always be an honest one. Applications such as the “remove tag” option allow members to remove their name from a picture of them. When utilized, this option, termed “de-tagging,” is usually a result of an unflattering photo, confirming my assertion that Facebook members are aware of the fact they are being judged through their appearances, and would rather present their most endearing, attractive self.

Two hours later, Melanie and I are still at Taylor’s, the local campus bar frequented by undergrads galore. Taylor’s is that bar for college students in Anywhere, USA. It is the hub of our social life, and tonight, like many others, it is filled with enthusiastic, alcohol-fueled youths. The music won’t quit and neither will we, snapping away on our digital cameras, deleting and re-posing until we get the pictures just right, until we look exactly the way we want to.