{"id":198,"date":"2008-09-09T21:44:55","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T01:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/?p=198"},"modified":"2008-12-16T04:56:30","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T08:56:30","slug":"searching-for-jeeves-atop-a-high-google-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2008\/09\/09\/searching-for-jeeves-atop-a-high-google-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for Jeeves Atop a High Google Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a friend gifted me with my own domain name<\/a> this summer, it felt like he had handed me the keys to a new car. NikkiLeon.com<\/a> was a URL I could share with contacts; it would be one of the first addresses an acquaintance might type when searching to see if I had a website. In that way, it was a vehicle for controlling my online identity, a tool to help me navigate the information swamp the web has become by preventing confusion with other \u201cNikki Leon\u201ds. What\u2019s more, it was mine — my friend\u2019s purchasing the domain meant it would not fall into the hands of the porn industry, overseas phishers, or the other Nikki Leons of the world. I imagined that just as the Internet seems to have only one Barack Obama or Seth Godin<\/a>, I was on my way to someday being the Nikki Leon ordained by Google.<\/p>\n

Wishful thinking. I know, of course, that Google doesn\u2019t always care if you buy your own domain name. If you search for Nikki Leon as of today, the “real” me is in the third hit, a Digital Natives Project blog post<\/a>. My personal blog<\/a>, to which NikkiLeon.com currently forwards, doesn\u2019t come until halfway down the page. The Nikki Leon favored by Google, it seems, is a twenty-one-year-old Go-Go dancer from Palmdale California<\/a> whose MySpace profile features pink leopard print and whose latest blog entry is entitled \u201cIf He Really Wants You\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m actually not too troubled by this (seems she was meant for the spotlight more than I). It\u2019s better than having the first hit for your name be a Gawker article about the real you, claiming that you \u201cUsed to Smoke Opiate of Masses.\u201d This was unfortunately the case for a freshman at Princeton University this year. The student posted a long message to the \u201cPrinceton 2012\u201d Facebook group that featured such choice phrases as \u201cwe are the 0.0000001% of the world,\u201d and \u201cWe are the anti-Christs to save the world from the mercy of God, the self-pity that festers within the masses.\u201d Having read the full post<\/a>, I\u2019d like to think it was a well-intended, if unsuccessful, satire of the \u201cgetting to know you\u201d messages some freshmen write in their class groups (as an undergrad I\u2019ve seen this first hand). Gawker didn\u2019t much care whether or not the post was serious or no. Instead, Gawker bloggers mocked the student and circulated information about her high school and career aspirations, along with a picture of her from her high school website.<\/p>\n

On the subject of controlling one\u2019s identity online, a recent New York Times article aptly stated<\/a>: \u201cIf you don\u2019t dive in, other people will define who you are.\u201d That is, if you fail to update your website or social networking profile with current, relevant information, the data others provide about you or themselves will crowd out your own. Diana Kimball<\/a> wrote a very informative post<\/a> last February about how to take hold of one\u2019s digital identity. There is of course, a limit to how much the average user can control, and the more of an online presence a young person has, the more information they give others to take out of context, as with the Gawker scenario described above. Viewed in this light, the digital age looks a little grimmer, despite all its possibilities. The freedom to define yourself online is also a burden. With visibility comes vulnerability, and controlling your image becomes a matter of preserving your personhood.<\/p>\n

The need to craft an online identity seems, at times, an existential issue, albeit more in the vein of Ask Jeeves<\/a> than Sartre. Who is Nikki Leon? Google has its answer, though it\u2019s not the one I\u2019d give. So how does one go about maintaining a digital self without getting lost in the shuffle or falling prey to Gawker types? For my part, I\u2019ll continue strengthening my ties to websites and bloggers, getting people to link to my URL, and doing the only other thing I can: praying to the internet gods.<\/p>\n

— Nikki Leon<\/a><\/p>\n

(In the spirit of this post, no links to the Gawker article. Their Google rankings are high enough. Cross-posted from my blog<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a friend gifted me with my own domain name this summer, it felt like he had handed me the keys to a new car. NikkiLeon.com was a URL I could share with contacts; it would be one of the first addresses an acquaintance might type when searching to see if I had a website. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1836,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,1187,2196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identity","category-information-quality","category-participation-gap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1836"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}