The Daily Hell Vol. III
Issue 24 - Google Her? I Barely Know Her! or Connor Stalks Himself
September 23, 2009
There has always been something both exciting and terrifying about meeting new people. Whether you are looking to establish a relationship of friendship or romance, there is always that initial period of uncertainty, relative politeness, and functional curiosity before we allow our true colors shine through. This is a brief but glorious time when you are able to present yourself in any way that you choose, usually saving the really weird shit for last.
Suddenly your old, hackneyed stories of college hijinx and traveling through Europe are new and fresh again, taking on new life for ears that have not heard, shortly before becoming old and hackneyed once more. Alas, this wonderful purgatory is being taken away from us as a result of the blessed curse of the modern search engine and by our coming of age in world that is more and more recorded and eternalized online.
Certainly, typing in a new friend's name is a temptation that few of us can resist simply because we are curious and we can. However, I believe it puts us at a disadvantage when getting to know someone. Now stories don’t need to be told, so much as presented within a reasonable context on Facebook. It takes the fun out of conversation and it takes the power out of a person’s hands to present themselves one creepy eccentricity at a time, rather than all at once.
I suppose there are some who might not want to learn about future friends and lovers this way, probably the same type that does not want to know the sex of their baby before it is born. Though there is a big difference between hearing, “Surprise, it’s a boy!” and “Surprise, it’s a guy who likes to smear feces on his basement wall, which is something you could have easily learned by looking at his old Myspace page!”
I’m certainly not above checking out the people I meet, especially if I have any interest in getting to know them further. There are some who call this “stalking.” I call it protecting my interests. However, for the most part, this wealth of knowledge is incredibly mundane. The thrill of the hunt usually wears off after reading a few headlines from articles in college news rags or browsing the public façade of a Privacy Protected Facebook page.
Recently after growing tired of seeing nothing but local National Honor Society listings from some small-town newspaper, I Googled my own name, just to make sure there weren’t any big fat turds in my own online biography, that discovered without context or preamble might shine on me in a negative light.
I was actually fairly pleased with most of what I found. The skeletons lurking behind the doors of closeted hyperlinks were relatively benign. There were a few that I deemed necessary to remove however. The following is an abridged collection of those skeletons, placed in as proper a context as I can, so that perhaps the next time someone types my name into a search engine, they will find this page as an adequate substitution for garbage that would make me look bad.
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Connor's Log of Stalking Himself
Page 1
The first page of results held no large surprises. The
pieces I’ve had published on Mr. Beller’s, my edit reels and various employment
and social networking sites, some of which I wasn’t even aware of.
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Problem: Friendster
I went to my profile and immediately deleted it, seeing what was probably the reason I have not been able to get a job in the last 12 months. I wish I had done a screen grab before deleting it, so I could include it here, but I at least saved a few pictures that were probably part and parcel to my continued unemployment.
The following, among others were included in the public photo section.
Anger:
Subdued Anger:
Douchebag:
Now, without proper explanation, I just look like a complete idiot in this one, which was the point!! That was the joke! Just look at my face!
This was for a local newspaper article about me making a promo video for an inner city non-profit middle school free of charge. Can you imagine seeing that
as a picture accompanying a local newspaper article about me? I don't even know how I got my eyes like that. I feel like maybe I was invoking Winston Churchill or something. I am hilarious!
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Abu Ghraib:
Friendster's coup de grace was this photo, tastefully and appropriately labeled as “Abu Ghraib.” I won’t write my friend’s name here, for fear someone should Google search his name and have this come up. I have no idea why I would have put it on Friendster. Granted, here I am putting it back on the Internet now, but I feel that in this context of discovering my online persona, it is revelatory, only of how misleading those personas can be… and of how fucked I probably am for something I put online 5 years ago. I do still laugh out loud seeing it though. He looks like a Jackolantern.
No Bones About It:
After deleting most my shame, I continued through the pages
and found a decade old artifact that I was ridiculed for in high school, but
now take a strange sense of pride in. It’s a 1997 article from my old local
paper headlined “No Bones About It, Mattapoisett teen is excavator - on a grand
scale,” highlighting my adventures as a 15-year-old boy on a paleontological
dig in Montana. I’m sure you can imagine the brilliant taunts that could only spring from the mind of a high school tormentor. I was admittedly an easy
target; a puffy-cheeked, bushy-haired, acne-riddled, braces-clad pile of awkward, going out in search of… bones.
I do think it’s pretty great that I was having a particularly poofy hair day. I remember it being quite awkward trying to pose with the bones. The photographer was pretty flummoxed because they really all just looked like rocks for the most part. Oh well.
Mysteries and Miscellany
I have no idea what this is:
I also signed a petition once apparently:
My CD release show was listed in The Brooklyn Paper, which I did not know until this search! Wish I had a print copy of that.
(Highlighted in Yellow and enlarged)
Friendster returns to fuck me again.
Getting towards the end of my search I found a disturbing turn of events. A site called "Spock.com" that just steals data from other social networking sites and saves it so that you can't escape your past if someone wants to look you up.
It was actually my cousin's page that came up, but there I was listed as "related to" with a link to my own Spock page (essentially just my old Friendster info in a crappier format). The real disaster here is that the photo the randomly chose to be my profile pic is Abu Ghraib, and without context it does seem like the person smiling maniacally over the drunken fool vomiting in the toilet would be the person who is associated with the info. Though I'm not sure if that's better or worse for me to be honest.
You're in good company, Cory Sabonis. You're in good company.
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Fetish Pages?
The final search page is literally just a bunch of fetish sites that have somehow linked themselves to one of my stories published on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. I'm not really sure how to feel about that. I guess any exposure is good exposure? And funnily enough, some of these sites are about exposing yourself, so that's another feather in my cap!
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So, what lessons can we derive from what we found in this encyclopedic volume of biographical information? Certainly that it takes a narcissist to repost information, both positive and negative, as long as it makes him the center of attention for a few minutes. Beyond that it seems that it is coming to pass that we must be very careful what we choose to put online. Even in the fecklessness of youth everything you present to the world will remain there for all to see long after your pride has shifted from that “killer keg-stand” you did senior year to the MBA with which you are trying to get a steady job.
Whereas photos were once merely a means of preserving certain memories, they have now become a permanent record of daily life and are thus interpreted as such by whoever sees them. Depending on the content of those photos, this can be good or bad. So while opening up your “Shutterfly” account to your friends is certainly a good way of sharing, perhaps some photos are better left in inconveniently large books collecting dust on your shelf.
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