I hope you’ve all written your thank-you letters to Al Gore. Because if our favorite presidential candidate of yesteryear hadn’t gone ahead and invented the Internet, our lives as college students and beyond wouldn’t be the same.

Oh, don’t deny it. You know you’ve done it. Like everyone else on this campus you’ve, upon meeting someone nice/attractive/remotely interesting for the first time, retreated to your hovel of a dorm room, sat down at your computer screen and started doing your “research.”

First comes Ph. First, last, middle names. Campus address, hometown, phone number. Cell phone, e-mail address and finally, if you’re lucky … AOL Instant Messenger screen name.

You can’t help but add him or her to your Buddy List. It’s only natural that you then casually check the away messages and after a months-long, secret, unrequited Internet friendship, you actually want to hit up his or her celly when he or she is at the 1800 Club.

But think back for just a minute. Before AIM, Friendster, blogs and Google searches. Before the “information age” globalized our sorry asses. Think back to when knowing someone’s middle name required more than a high-speed Internet connection — necessitated a private detective and a sick mind. Apparently that era vanished with Carnie Wilson’s extra weight.

True, the “old-fashioned” methods (swiping used Band-Aids, tracking between-class routes, staging head-on collisions) appear fairly creepy on the surface. And although they might be slightly less effective than today’s technological territory, they’re far more interesting.

Let’s be honest here. The Internet has made stalking acceptable, especially at Northwestern, where the ease with which you can find someone’s life history is unprecedented. If you ask me, this defeats the whole point.

Plus, compulsively checking away messages doesn’t exactly bring the same level of satisfaction as cracking someone’s locker combination does. Away messages are boring and no one worth stalking has any interesting information on their Ph profiles anyway.

“It’s like going from heroin to cigarettes,” says one unnamed Weinberg junior (whose screen name happens to be MisssPeyton), who admits that she maybe gets more than normal amounts of information on people from the Internet. “You just don’t get as much of a rush out of it, so you just have to do it more and more.”

Once you’ve been stalking someone’s blog for a good three months without actually knowing him or her, however, actual human interaction can be extremely awkward, if it ever takes place. If not for the stalker, at least for the stalked.

Although she recognizes there might be more efficient ways to make friends, MisssPeyton said the problem is that human interaction “is always somewhat of a let down. We live in a very judgmental society anyway, so you might as well create their personalities by little tidbits you get on the Internet.”

But if you’re going to sacrifice your dignity by obsessively following someone else, you might as well do it the right way. That way, if you get caught, at least it won’t be by a stalker link.