Google Unto Others as You Would Unto Yourself

On one of our work bulletin boards is the phrase, “Don’t Google Yourself.” It’s there on a post-it with a lot of other sticky-note advice, like “Shit Happens” and “Eat your veggies.” Of course, yesterday I did just that--Googled myself--because someone told me an article of mine had been published and I couldn’t remember the specific URL.

My name came up in about ten citations: mastheads from previous work, bios from earlier volunteer groups, a playlist from a radio show, that state fair presentation last summer. There was even a picture of me on one of the sites. (It wasn’t a bad picture. . . . But I wonder, why do I always look away when someone holds a camera in front of my face? I swear, there must be a dozen portraits of me with my head turned, like I’m advertising neck cream or I have a deformity I’m trying to hide, like Bob Dole always gripping that ballpoint pen.)

And then I find listings for the woman with my name who suffers from fibromylagia and a few for the man with my last name who writes romance books. There’s also the sound-alike essayist who lives in the Appalachians and the actress who has just published a book about her five former husbands and who also recently testified with Pamela Sue Anderson for a statewide ban on cockfighting. All of us share the same last name and if we all Google ourselves we’d run into each other somewhere along the findings.

Sometimes I Google my boss just to see what might turn up. Once a comment popped up that he had posted over ten years ago on some niche listserv and I got a hint of a private passion of his; in this case, classic typography. I Googled my daughter recently and felt my chest fill with pride at the results of her recent crew winnings in Tennessee. Her coach told his athletes that they should beware what they post on sites like FaceBook and MySpace because there are all kinds of reporters and other nosey folks who want to “out” Division I athletes—and what better way than to share a nasty picture of some local athletes downing Tequila Sunburns at a campus house party?

My mom once asked me to Google my grandpa, because she had heard his name had been included in the credits for The Band of Brothers. I did, but came up with nothing. Once my husband said to my son, “You won’t find anything if you Google me.” He said it a little defensively, I thought, but my son said that was alright by him. Who wants strangers to know stuff about us anyway?

I haven’t spoken to my brother in over a year and haven’t been close to him for awhile now. He sends the kids Christmas gift cards; I send him and his wife D’Amico gift cards in exchange (stuff that can be mailed but no personal visits between us) but that’s it. When my parents come to town they drive over to his house for a visit and then come across town to my house for the other half of their stay. My brother and I had a bad falling out; feelings were hurt.

So I got a generic Christmas letter from his wife this year that mentioned some of my brother’s new doings. I was interested. I Googled him. I got links to photo album pictures of their big wedding anniversary party. I got comments about his talents from some fans of his new gig. I got a calendar of places where he would be performing and teaching. I got news of everything I didn’t know about him. And then I got very sad. I felt not like he had died, which sometimes happens when you don’t stay in touch with someone you once were very close to, but that I had died. It was so clear that I was no longer part of his life—yet his kept going strong without me. I wasn’t next to him in the anniversary shots, he and his wife smiling broadly to the cameras. I hadn’t congratulated him on his new ventures. I hadn’t known about any of this, yet here it was, broadcast to the world. I’m never doing that again.

One of my most terrible Internet experiences was when I Googled my deceased cousin and got the article a San Diego reporter had written about her murder. There it was. Her name, her death, her murderer, his sentence, her mother’s (my aunt’s) tear-jerking response. God Damnit. Why did I do that? There I was in front of my computer in my white noise-filled office surrounded by clicking typewriters and whirring fax machines and people laughing in the hallway. My cousin had died and the whole thing was summarized in a screen full of words written by a stranger. I wanted to heave my monitor across the room. It was as if I had been invited to the cold morgue to identify her dead body while the others debated American Idol across the hall. I had all this awful reality in front of me and no one around me knew the space I was in. They had no sympathetic gestures. They had no words of condolences--they had no idea. How would they know I was confronting that gruesome experience again?

***

I read with interest Randy Cohen’s The Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday. In it he talks about the ethics of Googling young job or college applicants—and comes out against it. He writes:

“Put down the mouse and step away from the computer. . . . You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly. Your reading this student’s blog is legal — he posted it voluntarily, and in that sense it is public information — but not every young person grasps this. Many unwisely regard their blogs as at least semiprivate. You should not exploit their youthful folly.”

For an amusing take on the same topic, see The Unethicist, “I know what you blogged last summer.”

I blog anonymously. Many of us do. I like the freedom of writing from a perspective not loaded with all kinds of perceptions about who I am and what I do for a living (though, of course, Night Editor gives away some of the mystery). I like having a standing date with my blog. I like this unwritten commitment to an audience (however small) and to my own writing practice. But I’m keenly aware of my own truth--and my own dirty laundry. My husband e-mailed me this line after reading one of my posts: “Do you have to tell the whole world?” I want to respect the privacy of those I love—including those who might not love me anymore. I think about the chance that someone I know might stumble onto my blog and say, “Hey, I know her and . . . she’s writing about me! What the hell? I didn’t give her permission to do that.”

There’s a whole lot of Googling going on. I’m reminded to keep my head up and my fingers nimble, to be truthful and not spread the nastiness--and to remember, of course, it is the personal connections that make life rich and meaningful, not these random findings. I blog, therefore I write. I Google, therefore I know. I live and breathe in the real world, therefore I am.