My Google’s bigger now.
A couple weeks back I wrote on this blog an entry called “Confessions of a Self-Googler.” Part of my intention was to make an honest confession of an embarrassing thing I do– Googling myself–and which I suspect others do, too. Part of it was to get a sense of how these things get out into the world (the internet world, that is). Here’s what happened after I pushed “publish” on WordPress so that my post would go live:
Not much.
When I Googled myself ten minutes later, nothing. Then, after about a half-hour, on the second page of my Google, there it was: a link to the KR website. I was going to have to do something more to get “Confessions of a Self-Googler” to a large readership. So I emailed someone at Huffington Post, someone I knew, an editor I used to work with at a national magazine where I’d been an editor. She wrote back saying she thought the post was funny (generous of her). She was on vacation, but when she got back to her desk in a week, she would post it.
She did.
An hour after going up the Huffington Post, the post spidered out all over the place. Hits came up on Yahoo!News and the LA Times– which made the whole thing feel vaguely legitimate, validated. Within a day it was even bigger. Now if you search my name you come up with links to: The Poynter Blog network, the oldest media aggregator I know of, and which I’ve been looking at since 2000, before “Google” was even a verb. Sland3r, a site whose motto is: “Sland3r is Gossip.”. Boxxet, a blog that aggregates the aggregators. Silobreaker, a news site that classified the post under “Yemen,” because I’d mentioned Paul Torday’s book, which had Yemen in the title. And many more beyond that: Twitter, and WASALive, and Agriculture, and on and on all the way up to a site called President-Obama.com, which who knows how on Earth it ended up there, but even I’m getting bored now, and it’s my self-Google.
All the while I watched as my post slid down the Huffington Post’s Media page from “Featured Media Posts” to “Recent Media Posts” to oblivion. While I learned on the Huffington Post’s homepage that candidate McCain was making some new, embarrassingly desperate attack on candidate Obama, I checked my Google and checked the Huffington Post and then I started to get this feeling in my throat like maybe I was going to throw up a little. And I realized that here’s what had become of my little experiment: I was really, really tired of myself. Narcissism makes you feel kind of small. All that staring at my own reflection in the pond had had the effect of a parent catching his kid with a cigarette and then making him smoke the rest of the carton: My lungs hurt. My hands smelled bad. My head was swimming a little.
The real reason, I see, that we want to go to the bookstore to find our name on a spine is not to see our name on the spine– it’s to know we’ve written a book we feel represents the best we can do as novelists. A pithy blog post isn’t going to fulfill that.
So I looked at the post one last time yesterday, and remembered that the Huffington Post had even provided a pull-quote from “Confessions of a Self-Blogger,” which made me feel something like pride when I first saw it. But now I was a little embarrassed by it. It said: “Maybe we should eschew self-quantifying like Chekhov would most surely ask us to, like Tolstoy would want, like most self-effacing novelists and short story writers would expect. But it’s hard to know what their self-assessment was like before all this self-Googling.” That pull-quote had omitted the part of the ending to my original post that expressed most clearly what I thought I wanted to say, a parenthetical that I’ll free from parentheses here, and then let us be done with all this self-Googling nonsense:
“‘Since none of us can escape death,'” Chekhov once wrote his brother, “‘I attach no serious importance to my works, my name, or my literary errors. I advise you do the same.'”
Amen.