In William Gibson's latest novel Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard asks someone she's recently met, "I Google you, I find...?" She was trying to figure out who he was and whether he was trustworthy, and this was, I thought, an interesting way of asking the question. I hadn't thought much about that until I stumbled (via Paul Boutin) on Gary Wolf's recap of a debate in the early 1990s on the future of publishing. Wolf concludes:
For Louis [Rossetto, publisher of Wired], the Web was a platform through which to address an audience, destroying the power of old elites and giving new leaders a chance to emerge. For Dave [Winer], it was an answer to the errors, distortions, and illusions of professional media, which would be replaced by more direct and more personal forms. But something else happened. Sure, big media flourished, little media flourished, there were new ways of telling the truth and new ways of lying. And meanwhile the rise of the Web was simultaneous with the invention of reality TV, with the ubiquity of surveillance devices, with the phone call from a salesman who somehow knows not only your name, but also the amount of your mortgage and your credit card debt. The Web became just one facet of a totally public world, a feature of every person's inescapable visibility. Your "front porch," as Dave had it, is open to everybody, and Uncle Moe is a public character. These days, if you google somebody and nothing comes up, you wonder about them. Maybe the debate over the future of media was a sideshow that distracted us while the idea of private life disappeared. [emphasis added]
I suspect that Gibson and Wolf are onto something, that Google is becoming increasingly common a tool for us to learn about each other. I regularly Google people who write to me after reading "Journeyman," or whose work I discover through one source or another; and if nothing comes up, I do wonder about them. I have only one friend who has managed to leave no trace of herself that Google can find, and I now regard this as a genuine achievement, up there with living without a phone or credit cards or car (or all three put together). But she lives in Williamstown, Massachussetts, and I'm sure that's part of her secret. [Update: You can also do it living in Campbell, as my sister-in-law reports.] I confess I occasionally Google myself just to see what comes up. For a while I did it because I had switched home page addresses, and wanted to see if Google had caught up with the move; then I started doing it just to make sure I still existed (it now returns 956 pages; I'm not sure if I'm more real as the number climbs); now, I'm curious about what kind of identity-picture Google paints of me. What's striking about the cyber-doppelganger that Google generates (Googleganger? Doppelgoogle?) is that it's not one that we (the subject of the search) has assembled. Because of the way Google works, it's more like a mosaic assembled bit by bit (so to speak) by other people. It's a self-assembled social identity. As Keanu would say, "Whoa." I'm thinking about this because I've gotten an assignment-- actually, wheedled and begged my way into it-- to write a dual review of Natural-Born Cyborgs and Smart Mobs for the L. A. Times Book Review [registration required, maybe?]. (I like the LATBR, not least because they have an excellent editor-- who I met on a public radio show on the future of the book, no less-- and is one of the few serious newspaper book review sections. Yes, the New York Times dominates the field, but it's a rapidly-shrinking field.) Smart Mobs talks about how recommendations systems support the growth of smart mobs, and I think the phenomenon of Google identity could serve as a useful thing to consider in this context. Normally when people talk about recommendation systems, they give the examples of /. [slashdot to the uninitiated], epinions, Amazon, and eBay. In the first two, people can rate each other's contributions, thus allowing an elite of contributors to be identified. (Steven Johnson has a nice description of Slashdot elites in his book Emergence.) Amazon has a mixed system in which you're given recommendations based on what other people have bought, AND in which people's reviews can be rated by other readers. (It also lets you do wish lists.) eBay, of course, is held together by its reviewing system, which helps buyers and sellers judge each other's trustworthiness. What's notable about these systems is that they're 1) self-conscious, and 2) operate in narrow spheres. You know you're reviewing someone when you click on the "was this helpful" button, or rate someone's post; and, in all four of the examples above, you're judging them on specific kinds of performance (as a contributor, or a trustworthy economic agent). Google identity isn't quite a recommendation system, but people do use it somewhat that way; and it's neither self-conscious nor narrowly focused. And I suspect if offers another way of seeing the future of online recommendations and identity: as something more inchoate, more distributed, and requiring more interpretation than the identities produced by eBay. More updates as events warrant.
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