"You will be googled"

I joined LinkedIn about a year ago. I don't know why. I strongly suspect it has no purpose. I have never heard of anyone getting a job or even a promotion based on the professionalism and competence demonstrated in their LinkedIn page. I asked my brother about it - he is my go to resource for all the things I don't understand about how modern capitalism works - he told me it is good for one thing. There are laws about what you can and cannot ask people in a job interview. I didn't know that. I suspect most of you didn't either. There are no laws about what you can ask job applicant's connections on LinkedIn. So if you want to know if you are about to hire a heroin addict - LinkedIn is there to help you out, assuming your applicant was dumb enough to include his or her dealer as a connection (and that person's listed profession is "Heroin Dealer").

LinkedIn's own efforts to assist me in my professional life have not been useful. I clicked on a link for "Top Employers Resume Tips". As you might expect, it contained such pearls of wisdom as "Your resume should not contain spelling mistakes." Thanks for that. It also stated, unequivocally, "You will be googled." This bothered me. I try not to google myself (or make lewd innuendos re same) and now I have to. Given I have a relatively uncommon name, this process involves thinking of every possible search combination of [my name] + [something relevant]. I should add, I never thought the problem with being googled might be insufficient web-presence. I only think in terms of unpleasant things I might have left in the ether, things I was foolish enough to publish under my own name.

The internet is a fantastic resource and I don't like to talk shit about it but I'm going to have to here. Because the evolution of our technology has, among its many effects, the tendency toward a universal expectation for involvement. When cellphones first became available, it was really bizarre to call someone and have them answer from their car. I couldn't get over that. One of my brother's friends was the first person I knew with a cell phone and I was completely blown away when he called our house from our own driveway. It seemed like the dawning of a new age. Now, of course, any time you don't answer your phone the caller assumes you are screening them. I don't have a landline but I don't carry my phone either. It has one advantage over a landline to me - it simplifies moving. Instead of having to deal with the phone company and wait around for an entire day so a technician can come to your house (does that still happen?) you just change your billing address online. But if I'm not at home, I can't answer my phone because it is at home. See where I'm heading?

Prospective employers expect me to have a webpage. Why? I would need a website if I was a company, or a store, or a celebrity. But between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Blogger I have all the bases covered. The only reason to collate them in one site is vanity. My name on the page banner.

I'm surprised by the number of friends and acquaintances that have personal websites. I guess I shouldn't be. They get googled too. What isn't surprising is the likelihood a friend will have a personal website is inversely proportionate to age - people older than I am rarely have websites, people my age sometimes do, people ten years younger almost always do. A decade was all it took to remove the option of non-participation.

I don't have a problem with this per se. The internet is not like real space, there is no real sense of taking up space uselessly. It is completely different from physical geography in this way. Adding an enormous website with hundreds of pages does not decrease the available space the internet possesses. But it does generate a lot of meaningless shit. And it forces people to work at something they probably don't give a shit about. This is the extent of my complaint as it pertains to others. For myself, I resent the fact not having a website is now roughly equivalent to not having a telephone 30 years ago.

And I resent the obligation to construct a virtual persona. Companies are already obligate to do this - as collectives they do not possess any persona and so must construct some way of representing themselves. The internet is just another way to maximize their construct's exposure. As a person, I do have a persona (more accurately, a personality) and do not require digital representation. If anyone wants to find out about me they can call me, or email me, or go to my LinkedIn page and contact any or all of my hundreds of contacts.

The last point is that the internet is not subject to decay. Nor does time add perspective. A long time ago I was contacted by someone I tagged in a Facebook photo. He asked me to remove the tag. At the time I thought he must have become a criminal (or paranoid) or some kind. What other explanation could there be for wanting to remain internet-anonymous? Now I see the sense of it. During my self-googling I've found a lot of material I didn't realize was out there and even more I'd simply forgot about. Most of it was a pleasant surprise (hey, I was pretty clever in 2008!). Some I wish I had pursued more actively - several pieces on long lost blogs would have made nice journal articles. But there were also things that made me really cringe and wonder what the hell I was thinking when I put that online. The fairly obvious answer was I didn't give it much thought - the digital equivalent of a temper tantrum. That shit doesn't go away. It doesn't mellow with time. And its presence on the internet always seems like a calculated act, even when it was anything but.