Facebookery and the Art of Being NonGoogleAble

It seems that my wife and I are now targets for Facebook requests. This happened after a good friend of ours friended a prominent person in Daria fandom, who asked for befriendment - or was she passed on as a possible friend? I don't recall. The end result was that I think I now have three "Daria friends" and my wife - who has been out of Daria fandom for at least a half-decade - is now asking me, "who are these people?" Trust me, if you weren't writing fan fiction in 2002 or haven't visited our home since then I guarantee she has no idea who you are.

You might not get friended. As for me, sure, I'll friend you. But then again, I don't post anything on Facebook anymore so if you want to know what's going on with me, you're better off following this poor blog or whatever "Roentgen" posts about on the PPMB.

I'm not much of a fan of Facebook anymore, at least not since my mother found out that I have an account. As a result, I had to friend all of her friends (lest someone be offended) and now my Facebook account is filled with hundreds of gifts, requests, amusing things to read and other widgets that completely clutter the page when I check it out. If there's anything that annoys me on Facebook, it's to be given a widget or asked to fill out a quiz or whatever. I think the gifts are just stacking up on my page, waiting to be opened.

I ended up "friending a friend of a friend" so to speak and I get this e-mail: "Are you in this video lol check it out". The URL is some sort of bizarre conglomeration of consonants and since this person would never use "lol" in a sentence, I recognized it as a deadly spam flower with .exe thorns. Which meant that my Facebook and e-mail got about twenty responses saying "dude, you need to change your password". He probably opened one of those quizzes and the quiz .exe grabbed his personal information and turned his account into a spammer.

If Facebook is bad, MySpace is even worse. I'm not even putting a foot in it. The only social networking site I frequent is Twitter, and even then I only Twitter occasionally. My favorite social networking sites have always been, and will always be blogs. (Well, that and messageboard rants.)

This reminds me of a recent news item that I read. Apparently, someone got fired from their real life job because they had a little fun on Facebook and posted the pictures. I think it was highly unfair of those persons to be fired, because they never expected that they were supposed to be representing the good name of ConGlomoCorp while not flipping burgers or whatever it is that they did. I see it as just another example of the working world, the Great Beast trying to reach its tentacles into your private life. I'm more of the mind of that Dickens character from Great Expectations who almost literally turned his home into his castle, complete with drawbridge and told Pip (I believe) that if you asked him a question at work, he'd give a different answer than at home - the concept being that when he got home he disassociated himself completely from his work self.

A long time ago, I thought that it would be much better for Daria fans et. al. to start using their real names. I felt that anonymity had become too pervasive. Who the hell is that Brother Grimace guy, anyway? Or that MDetector5 fellow? If I met them in real life I certainly wouldn't call them that. For a while, there were quite a few fans that used their real names.

Then The Angst Guy had a need to disassociate himself from his real-life name and he because the figure of dread and penguin lust that we all know and love. An old time Daria fan with a very singularly spelled last name changed his name to Mike Xeno, and stripped me of the point of pride I had in being able to spell that name. (I can't spell it now, it's been too long.) Recently, a now-published author in Daria fandom has asked that all of his fanfiction be retitled without reference to the former real name he was using when wrote his stories. His explanation was that he felt no shame in anything he wrote for Daria fans, but a prospective employer had been Googling his name and wanted to ask a bunch of innocuous questions. He felt that he had no need to repeat the experience.

Face it, if anyone knows your real name they will Google it. And occasionally, you might be tempted to Google yourself, an act illegal in 37 states if your hands aren't above your waist. Thank the heavens that my real name is "semi-non-Googleable". You might get the conservative commentator or the famous singer before you ever find me.

I recently read an article on Wired about someone taking a challenge to remain hidden for one month without hiding out in the desert or the forest. Wired readers got a $5000 bounty if they could find the guy within a month. The man created the alternative identity of James Donald Gatz. "Donald" was the man's real middle name. (A mistake to give himself a middle name linked to his real one, BTW.) However, James Gatz was a name out of the book The Great Gatsby which was Gatsby's real name. The person going into hiding felt secure that anyone trying to look up the name "James Gatz" would simply get a big list of articles from F. Scott Fitzgerald scholarship. The name James Gatz was "non-Googleable".

There have been articles about how giving your child a "unique name" like Orangejello or Winner or whatever is an act which is considered by many child rearing experts to be a mistake. All it does it call unwanted attention to your poor kid, who just ends up getting picked on more than the average kid because of his weird-ass name. In the internet age, it might actually be a good idea to give your kid the most common name possible. We might end up with a bevy of kids in the future named John Smith, simply so that these kids might have the power to hide in the internet among the 10,000 other John Smiths, their online activities virtually hidden from any oversight - and hidden from a future employer.

P. S. A good read is The True Story of How Stacy Rowe Destroyed the Fashion Club, by ticknart.