Google and be damned - Looking yourself up on the internet is a very dangerous thing, says Reese Witherspoon.
Those who Google themselves are either already mad or they will eventually be driven mad, says Bryony Gordon
The first time I did it, my palms were sweaty and my brow was furrowed. My whole being quivered in nervous expectation. Someone had advised me not to do it – that if I did I would soon be sucked into a dark world where reality was altered and people were mostly mad, bad and dangerous to know – but I ignored them. I went with the words of my other, cooler friends, who assured me that it was intoxicating and heady and that I had to try it at least once. So, with a sharp intake of breath, I did it.
I Googled myself.
The first couple of pages contained articles I had written. The next few, the work of a jewellery designer with whom I shared a name. After that, my Facebook page and my prehistoric MySpace page, at which point I probably should have stopped. But once you click on the “Next” button, it is very difficult to stop; like popping a Pringle in your mouth, or eating a Chinese takeaway. Just when you think you’ve had enough, you want more.
And so it was that 10 pages in, I found a forum that included a thread where a group of men discussed my byline picture. Reader, they were not complimentary. Someone said I looked like a rugby fullback, another suggested that my appearance was more eastern European shot-putter on steroids. Finally, some fellow waded in to put an end to the debate, revealing that he had an Irish wolfhound called Bryony, and that frankly, the Irish wolfhound looked better.
I was reminded of a scene in the second series of The Thick Of It, where Peter Mannion, an old-school Tory MP, is told by his Steve Hilton-style spin doctor that he needs to start embracing the internet. “Have you ever tried Googling your own name?” he asks. “It’s like opening the door to a room where everyone tells you how s––– you are.” I think this nicely encapsulates the relative merits of Googling yourself: namely, that there are none. Not even if you are the actor Dominic West, who this week revealed that he regularly searches for himself on the internet. “I like to have chats about myself with people – mainly putting forward the case for the defence. I use my own name but nobody ever believes me.”
Now, I am not Dominic West (Hollywood star; 5,030,000 Google results in just 0.18 seconds). I am Bryony Gordon (newspaper journalist; 431,000 Google results in a glacial 0.21 seconds). But I don’t think it matters whether you are a world famous actor or Joe Bloggs; the fact remains that Googling yourself is a dangerous and egoistical exercise that will never end well. The best case scenario for Joe Bloggs is that he finds nothing, thus making him feel like a nobody; the worst that he finds a group of his mates bitching about him on a social networking site. Ditto, on a good day the likes of Dominic West will come away from a self-Googling session with an even bigger sense of self-importance, on a bad one with a miserable neediness that their agents and lackeys will have to pull them out of. As Reese Witherspoon says, “it’s an affirmation of every horrible feeling you have about yourself”.
Those who Google themselves are either already mad – see Robbie Williams, who has admitted to printing out criticism of himself from the internet – or they will eventually be driven mad. Google puts only a certain section of society under the microscope, and that is the section of society that sits behind a computer in a darkened room, weeping into their keyboards when they are not typing abuse into them. The good news? Not everybody thinks this way about you. The bad news? That’s probably because they are not thinking of you at all – they are too busy thinking about themselves, and most probably typing their names into Google.
And here is another reason not to Google yourself: the auto-suggest function in the search box. It was my uncle who pointed out to me, over an uncomfortable family gathering, that when he typed my name into Google one of the first things that came up was “Bryony Gordon breasts”. I could hardly explain that it was because I had written about topless sunbathing.
Which is why you should never Google other people either. You can so often get it wrong. One friend shares her name with a porn star (“when blind dates turn up, they are almost always disappointed”), while my boyfriend shares his with a Christian fundamentalist. Too much information is not always great, and it’s not even always correct. In Germany, they tried to ban HR departments from Googling job applicants for this reason.
Internet expert Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger recently published Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it, he argues that having so much information at the touch of a button is not necessarily a good thing; that, like memories, our digital footprints should be allowed to fade. He cites a psychotherapist from Vancouver who was crossing the border into the US to collect a friend from Seattle airport. Andrew Feldmar had made this journey on several occasions, but on this one, the border staff decided to Google him. They found that Feldmar had once written an academic journal in which he admitted that he had taken LSD in the Sixties. He was accused of a “crime involving moral turpitude” and barred from entering the United States. Google and be damned. ( telegraph.co.uk )
Those who Google themselves are either already mad or they will eventually be driven mad, says Bryony Gordon
The first time I did it, my palms were sweaty and my brow was furrowed. My whole being quivered in nervous expectation. Someone had advised me not to do it – that if I did I would soon be sucked into a dark world where reality was altered and people were mostly mad, bad and dangerous to know – but I ignored them. I went with the words of my other, cooler friends, who assured me that it was intoxicating and heady and that I had to try it at least once. So, with a sharp intake of breath, I did it.
I Googled myself.
The first couple of pages contained articles I had written. The next few, the work of a jewellery designer with whom I shared a name. After that, my Facebook page and my prehistoric MySpace page, at which point I probably should have stopped. But once you click on the “Next” button, it is very difficult to stop; like popping a Pringle in your mouth, or eating a Chinese takeaway. Just when you think you’ve had enough, you want more.
And so it was that 10 pages in, I found a forum that included a thread where a group of men discussed my byline picture. Reader, they were not complimentary. Someone said I looked like a rugby fullback, another suggested that my appearance was more eastern European shot-putter on steroids. Finally, some fellow waded in to put an end to the debate, revealing that he had an Irish wolfhound called Bryony, and that frankly, the Irish wolfhound looked better.
I was reminded of a scene in the second series of The Thick Of It, where Peter Mannion, an old-school Tory MP, is told by his Steve Hilton-style spin doctor that he needs to start embracing the internet. “Have you ever tried Googling your own name?” he asks. “It’s like opening the door to a room where everyone tells you how s––– you are.” I think this nicely encapsulates the relative merits of Googling yourself: namely, that there are none. Not even if you are the actor Dominic West, who this week revealed that he regularly searches for himself on the internet. “I like to have chats about myself with people – mainly putting forward the case for the defence. I use my own name but nobody ever believes me.”
Now, I am not Dominic West (Hollywood star; 5,030,000 Google results in just 0.18 seconds). I am Bryony Gordon (newspaper journalist; 431,000 Google results in a glacial 0.21 seconds). But I don’t think it matters whether you are a world famous actor or Joe Bloggs; the fact remains that Googling yourself is a dangerous and egoistical exercise that will never end well. The best case scenario for Joe Bloggs is that he finds nothing, thus making him feel like a nobody; the worst that he finds a group of his mates bitching about him on a social networking site. Ditto, on a good day the likes of Dominic West will come away from a self-Googling session with an even bigger sense of self-importance, on a bad one with a miserable neediness that their agents and lackeys will have to pull them out of. As Reese Witherspoon says, “it’s an affirmation of every horrible feeling you have about yourself”.
Those who Google themselves are either already mad – see Robbie Williams, who has admitted to printing out criticism of himself from the internet – or they will eventually be driven mad. Google puts only a certain section of society under the microscope, and that is the section of society that sits behind a computer in a darkened room, weeping into their keyboards when they are not typing abuse into them. The good news? Not everybody thinks this way about you. The bad news? That’s probably because they are not thinking of you at all – they are too busy thinking about themselves, and most probably typing their names into Google.
And here is another reason not to Google yourself: the auto-suggest function in the search box. It was my uncle who pointed out to me, over an uncomfortable family gathering, that when he typed my name into Google one of the first things that came up was “Bryony Gordon breasts”. I could hardly explain that it was because I had written about topless sunbathing.
Which is why you should never Google other people either. You can so often get it wrong. One friend shares her name with a porn star (“when blind dates turn up, they are almost always disappointed”), while my boyfriend shares his with a Christian fundamentalist. Too much information is not always great, and it’s not even always correct. In Germany, they tried to ban HR departments from Googling job applicants for this reason.
Internet expert Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger recently published Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it, he argues that having so much information at the touch of a button is not necessarily a good thing; that, like memories, our digital footprints should be allowed to fade. He cites a psychotherapist from Vancouver who was crossing the border into the US to collect a friend from Seattle airport. Andrew Feldmar had made this journey on several occasions, but on this one, the border staff decided to Google him. They found that Feldmar had once written an academic journal in which he admitted that he had taken LSD in the Sixties. He was accused of a “crime involving moral turpitude” and barred from entering the United States. Google and be damned. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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