Friday, January 20, 2006

A Presence on the Web

It’s a terrible thing to realize your presence on the Web. Have you ever Googled yourself? The Internet is a refuse heap of information, a haunted graveyard. If you’ve had any kind of public life or associations, on the Internet you’ll find traces. You can review these traces by googling yourself. Google is an Internet search engine. You enter names or other terms into a dialogue box, and Google displays a list of Websites associated with those search terms. So if you want information about the kid who asked your daughter to the prom, you can type in variations on his name, perhaps adding the name of the high school—that sort of thing—and the search engine will pull up dozens or hundreds of links referencing people associated with those terms, including, perhaps, the strange kid whose background you want to know.

I wouldn’t recommend such a search, however. Better just to beat yourself on the head with a bat. You’ll feel better. Judging by my own adventure in self-googling, you’re likely to find stuff that will frighten you.

There can’t be many Joseph Chaneys in the world, but I seem to be the only one who has managed to avoid really serious trouble. For example, one young Joseph Chaney made a name for himself by running away with his home-school teacher. The woman abandoned her husband in Lebanon, Tennessee, and took the teenager who shares my name on a steamy cross-country tour, winding up at a Super 8 Motel near Albuquerque, where they were nabbed by police. These geographical details are unfortunate for me, because I attended school in Tennessee also, and I happen almost every year to go to a computer culture conference precisely in Albuquerque. Anyone searching for information about me with one of those associations in mind will pull up this story about the boy-Lolita and his thirty-six-year-old home school teacher. The article isn’t dated, so the story could, in theory, be about me.

Another Joseph Chaney who haunts the Web writes for New York University’s undergraduate online journal, The Washington Square Times. Again, unfortunately for me, he has written a foolish obituary that insults one of my favorite teachers from graduate school, a French philosopher who died a couple of years ago. Because careful scrutiny is required to determine that the writer is currently a college student, it’s possible for an acquaintance of mine, in an idle moment of Internet trawling, to snag this shameful article and wonder, “Could that possibly be Joe? Is he really capable of such treachery?” Anyone searching for me in association with my former teacher would certainly pull up this idiotic article.

Out there in cyberspace, someone—whether a prospective employer, a friend, or an enemy—is googling you, and you have no control over what they find, true or false, and what they may think about you based on what they find. True traces of your life on the Internet can be just as worrying. Years ago I participated in an online political forum of a kind that used to be common: an unedited free-for-all public discussion hosted by a famous magazine. Captured in some dark archive are transcripts of exchanges I had with angry and disturbed individuals in which, due to the quantity of muck we were raking, everyone managed to get mud on his face.

More than ever, you can’t escape your past. With the advent of the Internet and email, most of us are, for the first time, producing extensive public, or at least retrievable, and largely permanent records of our thoughts and activities. Beginning with speech, and developing through writing, printing, and photocopying, Western culture has always been moving in this direction—toward the omnipresence of representation, a condition that erodes our identities, our authority and authorship. Even as the evidence of our individual lives increases, we are losing ourselves in an endless multiplicity of floating identities. In fact, once you are caught in the Web, the Web itself is your identity. This, dear friends, is the apocalypse. A sign should appear above the portal of the Internet: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE!

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on January 20, 2006
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