from Juan Cole’s blog on the google smear.
The Google search has become so popular that prospective couples planning a date will google one another. Mark Levine, a historian at the University of California Irvine, tells the story of how a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on google. That is, if it isn’t in google, it didn’t happen. (Levine was able to retrieve the incident from Lexis Nexis, a restricted database).
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
I’m interested in this post not for its political content, although Horowitz has gained considerable notoriety in the US for his Academic Bill of Rights, which protects “non-partisan”, that is conservative speech on campus. See here and here and here. Rather, this post suggests that we are coming to be defined by the online documentation of our lives. In other words, you’re not real (i.e., you don’t exist) if you cannot be googled. However, because there’s no way to easily check the accuracy of Google entries, Cole points out that you could still be “fake” even if you’re found online. We can easily say that our lives are a social construction, made up of our experiences as well as others’ perceptions of us. Googling adds a virtual layer.
Hmm. If you’re only real because of what is reported about you online, then some guerilla tactics are possible. Perhaps we could encourage children from a very early age to start sprinkling the web with news about themselves ;-).
I confess to Googling people occasionally. It’s still somewhat difficult unless you happen to know a few details about a person, unless the person either happens to have a substantial online presence, or they happen to have a very uncommon name. With reference to the article, it seems as though it wouldn’t be too difficult to counteract the smearing by simply getting your friends to link to your own home page with your name, volume still counts with Google. I enjoy the fact that googling for my name returns my LlamaTown webpage I made for a class in my first year.
It’s true. I’ve googled people as well, especially at work, as I wanted some background
info on them so I could ask them questions and such about their work (which was interesting,
in the area of planning). Anyway, when i congratulated them on some previous achievements, and
questioned them, I think they were surprised, and uncomfortable, unfortunately…