Googling in the Age of Vanity

I’m very honored to be the first to guest here at RtB.  Trivia question: who is the only person to guest host the Tonight Show during the Leno tenure?

Initially I’d planned to write about my upcoming 20^th high school reunion and how I thought it might resemble something out of West Side Story—MySpacers on one side of the Marriott ballroom eyeing with suspicion those greasy Facebookers on the other—then I noticed that RF had Googled my name.

I used to Google my name pretty frequently. I would bet many do. For the sake of this entry I did it the other night, but otherwise I don’t do it anymore. A link to Digg reminded me why.

The Digg page features a link to a little thing on North Korea I wrote a couple months ago. There are 95 comments underneath the digg, most of them asserting, in one manner or another, that I’m an imbecile.  This doesn’t bother me (anymore).  The dawn of user comments has allowed name-calling to reached the most vile of lows, and with total impunity.  You can’t fight it.

Anyway, one of the comments at Digg is a reprint of a news item dated May 7 from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s official news outlet, that claims to be in response to my article.  Having read numerous bumbling translations of KCNA news items, I recognized the tone immediately as theirs.  The item pointed me out by name, even calling me a traitor!

I was horrified.  I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t understand it.  Why would they bother?

I spent the next hour of my life cutting and pasting Korean fragments from the agency’s website into a translator.  I went through every item published on 7 May and found no mention of me.  By now I was disappointed.  I wanted it to be there.  So I wondered if the date was wrong, and I began looking at dates around the target date.

By now I’d abandoned common sense, because I wanted it all to be true, I couldn’t wait to tell my wife about being a traitor to the North Koreans!

All told I spent almost 3 hours on this before accepting that it was a gag, cleverly written.  My little ego got the better of me. As a former English major I couldn’t help but remember the closing lines to Joyce’s “Araby” in Dubliners:

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

Not Joyce’s best, but it works.

One day you too, RF, as a freelancer will Google yourself, and I will too. But before then you’ll have to do something about the name you write under. As is, you have dozens of Googlegangers.  Are you the one who throws psychic astrologer parties? Fullbright scholar?  Wanted in Virginia for money laundering? So my suggestion to you is either develop a pseudonym or tweak your name enough to make it search-friendly.

But the best thing would be simply to never google yourself.