mediajunk

I admit that I am a frequent practitioner of “vanity Googling” – the act, I have just learned from a Febuary 2003 article in the Boston Globe, of looking yourself up in Google.

The article by Neil Swidey explores the voyeuristic tendencies that Google's effectiveness is cultivating among a growing population of users. Swidey makes many thought-provoking points, backed with good examples of how the search engine that sorts out the wheat from the chaff has simultaneously created a raft of new privacy issues.

“While most of your embarrassing baggage was already available to the public,” he writes, “it was effectively off-limits to everyone but the professionally intrepid or supremely nosy. Now, in states where court records have gone online, and thanks to the one-click ease of Google, you can read all the sordid details of your neighbor's divorce with no more effort than it takes to check your e-mail.

‘It's the collapse of inconvenience,’ says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. ‘It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.’”

Swidey’s piece is a good primer for anyone who wants to know why managing your identity on the internet has become all-important.

The article also made me aware of the fascinating – and tragic – story of 20-year old Amy Boyer, who was being stalked by a former student of her high school. 21-year old Liam Youens, kept a diary-like site that detailed various acts of stalking he had carried out on Boyer since 8th grade, and his intentions to kill her.

In late 1999, he did exactly that, shooting Amy Boyer and then himself.

Amy’s father is now a campaigner for privacy rights (since Youens used a "detective" company to find out where his daughter worked) – though he feels that he may have been able to prevent his daughter's death if he, or Amy, had only come across Youens’s site. In the interests of promoting awareness, he has reproduced the original site.

It would be hard to imagine the horror Amy Boyer would have felt had she come across her stalker’s site. But the simple act of “vanity Googling” could have helped her avoid her terrible fate.