In Ovid's epoch-transcending narrative poem, there is recounted a popular story in Greek and Roman mythology, that of Diana and Actaeon. It goes something like this: Diana, the beautiful goddess of the hunt, is bathing her virgin limbs in the crystal waters of the valley called Gargaphie. Noble Actaeon, among the best hunters in Thebes, is also pursuing game in the valley, and it happens that through the rushes he sights the radiant beauty of the goddess. Actaeon is transfixed, as Diana's face glows like clouds illuminated by the sun's rays at dusk. Also, she is totally naked. Actaeon knows it's kind of creepy to keep staring at this chick, but she doesn't see him, so what's the harm? His boys are not going to believe this.

But then she does see him. And at first she's like, whoa that's weird that this guy is stalking me, but then she's kind of flattered and, well, he's sort of cute in a skinny, Aaron Carter kind of way. On the other hand, she met this guy maybe once, and it was at a party where the music was really loud and she couldn't even really hear what he was saying (something about his frat's pet hermit crab? Um, ok). She thought it was kind of strange that he would friend-request her, but maybe he's just one of those people who has a lot of friends, and besides, she never really turns down friend-requests 'cause what difference does it make?

Anyway, the story ends kind of anti-climactically: Facebook disables the "stalker list" tool, Actaeon never ends up talking to Diana in person again, and Diana kind of shrugs the whole thing off because it doesn't matter after she turns Actaeon into a stag and orders his own hunting dogs to tear his flesh limb from limb amidst his voiceless cries, for being such a creepazoid.

As those of us who study classics are incessantly reminded, there are many parallels between our own culture and a bunch of godless pederasts, and, indeed, I thought of the story of Diana and Actaeon last week during the brief flurry of gossip and anxiety surrounding FacebookStalkerListToolgate. Here's a rundown if you missed it because you're sooo above using Facebook regularly: a rumor broke that if you click on the "search" box and press the down arrow key on your keyboard, a drop-down list will appear showing your five friends who have searched your name most frequently. This feature mysteriously disappeared soon after, but then it was discovered that the same list could be called up with the "." key.

The news spread across Greek-house blitzlists like an Econ 10 survey, and conspiracy theories soon abounded. Was the stalker list a list of people who search for you obsessively? (This was the first and most prevalent speculation.) Was it a list of people you search for obsessively? Was it determined by some complex algorithm involving coincident searches and/or profile-viewings and/or the number of "gUrLz DaY aT tHe BeAcH" photo albums posted on a profile that Facebook thought you might enjoy perusing and/or the Patriot Act? Media-gossip blog Gawker, in a series of posts, parsed the possible explanations for how the stalker list tool worked. Some computer types eventually weighed in that some kind of "zero value" was attached to each Facebook friend somewhere in secret-computer-land; the lower the zero value, the higher the friend appeared on the stalker list. Apparently there was also a way to access this information for more than just five friends in the temporary internet files of a given computer.

Doing a little sleuthing of my own, I found that my friends on my overall top-five list also headed up the drop-down lists for the letters of their first and surnames. My most ardent stalker, Xavier Zydeco '09, for instance, also appeared first on my "x" and "z" lists. Furthermore, Zamboni Xenophobe '08, who did not make my top five, appeared second on my "x" list, and third on my "z" list, after Xavier and Quintilius Zanzibar '11. So the algorithm did indeed seem to hold for all my friends, not just the top five. Needless to say, I spent the next twenty minutes typing all the letters of the alphabet into the search box attempting to make a mental list of which friends were perhaps a little too friendly and which obviously weren't pulling their weight in terms of showing appropriate interest in my Facebook profile.

"Interest" is the key word Facebook purportedly used to define the feature, according to a Gawker tip from a self-proclaimed Facebook man-behind-the-curtain: "The five friends that you see below the search box are populated based on people whom we think you'd be most interested in. Taking into account various factors, we attempt to make an educated guess as to who it is you're looking for when you start typing a name in the search box."

My high-scoring friends, for the most part, seemed to make sense. There were a few unexpected ones, perhaps owing to the fact that I don't use the search bar often (more of a browsing-updated-profiles guy myself), or perhaps just because a Facebook profile is a reverse panopticon, a room walled with two-way mirrors, and there's really no way to know which friends are on the outside of it, looking in. Regardless, most of my most interested were (I think) frequent Facebook users, and many were old friends or flames whom I've Facebook-known since back when it was a social networking site for the Ivy League rather than a zombie-fight-networking site for stay-at-home Dads.

Of course, Facebook disabled the stalker list tool the same day the nifty trick came to light. There were concerns about "privacy issues," which is what Facebook users cite when they're worried about being outed as Facebook users. Indeed, there is a mild, nagging anxiety shared by all relatively frequent Facebookers that they use it more than is normal, which implies two sins. The first is the sin of caring about such trivial and small-minded things as the world of social interactions and classifications and one's place within it. This sin encloses such lesser iniquities as being eager to associate oneself with a group of a certain status, caring about what others think of you, and the Facebook Original Sin, which is the irony of forging and navigating online "friendships" in the time, it is presumed, one could be getting out there and actually chatting up real people. Save for the last of these, all social beings (read: anyone not shackled to a radiator in the basement of a cult compound) share these anxieties, but few care to be confronted with them. Thus, the stalker list tool held the invisible threat of exposing overeager Facebookers as overeager Facebookers. Facebook overindulgence can only operate as a dirty secret; a vice isn't a vice until someone else knows you do it. Just ask Oscar Wilde, Eliot Spitzer, Actaeon, and James "Our First Gay President" Buchanan.

The second sin of Facebooking that the stalker tool threatened to expose is the sin of Looking at People Without Them Knowing. Facebook stalking. Humans have a deep-seated, perhaps evolutionarily functional aversion to being watched without our knowledge. It puts us in a position of vulnerability, exploited over the millennia by saber-toothed tigers, perverts, and cops. And yet to be watched, viewed, or tracked means you're of some kind of interest to the watcher, viewer, or tracker. The sensation is one of disquietude lightly tinged with flattered pleasure. And so on Facebook, we put ourselves out there to be gazed at. If you post seven photo albums from your birthday bash on your profile, you're probably just as into being peeped at as any "stalker" is into peeping at you.

Really, by virtue of the one-way interaction that Facebook facilitates, anyone who has ever browsed Facebook is a Facebook stalker. It is not unnatural or abnormal to meander through the profile of a friend you find interesting (there's the operative word again), funny, or original. Perhaps you simply find it pleasing to look at pictures of said friend. But the wave of visceral anxiety that passed over campus last week as four-thousand Facebook users wondered how many stalker lists they appeared on was probably unwarranted because, at the heart of it, what else is Facebook for?

What I'm trying to say here is that if I showed up on your stalker list, you're the creep, not me.