Fluff from the naval of my mind

The increased use of social networks is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they open up a world of possibilities for meeting other people we may never have otherwise met, on the other they expose those who participate in a public way to a level of personal scrutiny previously reserved for the famous.

I do not mean that we are all having out fifteen minutes of fame, but that we now make available to even the casual observer information about ourselves that would previously have been difficult to obtain. This information can be prejudicial in a number of ways.

It is commonplace nowadays for prospective employers, or clients, to ‘google’ people by name to see what turns up. This means that it is often very easy to find blogs and other social media websites belonging to people. This in turn means that when one is producing a personal blog or interacting on social media websites one has a simple choice; either disguise yourself behind a pseudonym or use your own name. If one’s identity become known (or is declared by using your own name) then everything you ever post is likely to come to the attention of prospective employers of clients, which raises another question; do you engage wholeheartedly in social media and express yourself freely, or do you present an image that you want prospects to see.

The dilemma, for me at least, is that I want to express myself freely using my own name, while simultaneously realising that doing so may prejudice some clients. The simple fact is that I change my opinion on subjects and while an employer may casually review whatever google throws up they are unlikely to read the entire canon of my work. The result will be they see the ‘google-me’ rather than me, as I am now.

The google-me is also biased. I googled myself six months ago and most of the hits related to my work (mostly forum posts). I repeated this self-google this morning and most of the hits relate to social media sites. The difference being the immediate impression of me as presented by google is significantly different today to what it was six months ago. Six monts ago I was ‘all business’ but now my google-me is full of daily trivia from social network sites.

This is significant, not because I am concerned about what these social site’s say about me as a person — I am who I am and I would not commit to paper (or screen) anything I would not freely tell you in person — but of greater concern to me is that people are often lazy in their research and fail to account for when something was written and picked up by google. These people will not bother to research my history to see whether a throwaway comment posted to Twitter six months ago was a joke, part of the Twitter stream, or whether my opinion has changed in the past few months. What they see is that one comment, isolated from both the original context and for the context of time.

What to do? I have no wish to stop using social network sites but I do realise that google-me fails to represent me as a person and despite this some people will assume that I am my google-me.

I am both fortunate and unfortunate to have a fairly unique name (I did once find another Mark Bools). This is fortunate in that I am unlikely to be confused with anyone else (so at least I will not have any one else’s internet presence confused with my own). It is unfortunate in that it is harder to hide in the crowd.

So, what are your thoughts on your google-me? Is this something you’ve thought about? Do you present an image, or are you just yourself and to hell with the consequences? Is there any practical way we can control our google-me?