The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
“How to Stalk Someone On Instagram” by Morgan Lee
Why would anyone need to stalk someone on social media? There is no wrong answer to this. Say you are a business looking to hire; say your best friend calls you up and claims she has met the love of her life; say you met a cute guy at a concert. Before you can proceed with any important decision-making, you must find out what you can about the victim. And sometimes the NSA is just too expensive to hire, so it is time to improvise.
It starts off innocent. You just want to get a nice, general overview of who the person is. The first impression you get is based off the profile picture, what is written in the bio section, and the number of followers. There are two types of people in this world: those who use emojis in their bios, and those who do not.
Also, hope to God their page is not on private. If it is, stop reading now.
As you scroll through their Instagram page, it is important to note the four types of photo categories: selfies, animals, friends or landscapes. Just a casual scroll through will give you the sense of which category they fall in.
If it is majority landscapes, they are a good person. If it is majority animals and friends, they are a great person. If it is majority selfies, proceed with caution.
So you scroll and scroll, and naturally there are images in this virtual scrapbook that catch your eye. You click on these pictures and scrutinize the caption. Look for punctuation mistakes and grammar slip-ups. These are the peepholes in the worldwide web that show you who people really are.
After perusing their feed, you stop on an image where they tagged someone who appears to be their best friend. So you click on their accomplice. It is important to know who their friends are.
If their friend’s page is on private, you return to the original victim’s. If their friend’s page is public, you just fell down a rabbit hole of no return. Let’s just say you will end up on the original victim’s page without really knowing how you got back there.
The final tip, and undoubtedly the most important: Do not let your thumb twitch, slip, or spazz because if you accidently “like” one of their photos… I hope you have the NSA on speed dial.