i'll be watching you

Some of you know I recently updated and actually started using (a little bit, anyway) a myspace account that had been lying dormant for a few years. It still said I was single and living in Tucson, that's how old it was :-) Anyway, so there's a little thingy that says how many times my profile has been looked at; so far, I'm up to 220 in a little more than a month. Now, since I have this blog I don't have one on there, so people probably aren't looking at me repeatedly for something like that. So who are all these people? It's usually gone up at least a few numbers between every time I check it. This train of thought kind of dovetails with my misgivings about the fact that on Friendster you can optionally see who has looked at you as long as they haven't blocked that option out themselves. I am kind of simultaneously fascinated and creeped out that there's just random people looking at what I felt moved to post on the internet. It's such a voyeur/exhibitionist split, these websites. You can show yourself off in a controlled way and see if people (even people you don't know) respond, and you can look up people based on various criterion and read what they chose to put up. The internet is such a fascinating social thing, isn't it? I've been thinking more these last few months about just how much things have changed in even the last few years, and the social and theoretical implications are amazing.
Anyway, my last thought in this train is a much more embarrassing one. Someone recently advised my friend Jesse to put up a "hidden counter" on his blog to see who was looking at it. I, technological imbecile that I am, didn't really know you could do that. I'm a total internet addict, even worse since I moved here, and generally when I use the internet I am wasting or killing time so I check my email and then just check through everybody's blogs to see if anything new has come up. Does that mean a lot of my friends are aware that I look at their blogs at least a few times a day and sometimes much more than that, depending on my access and my level of procrastination? Eep.