Copyright 2000 The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San
Diego Union-Tribune
December 5, 2000, Tuesday
SECTION: COMPUTER LINK;Pg. 6
LENGTH: 1213 words
HEADLINE: I
surf, therefore I am; Finding yourself -- literally -- on the pages of the Web
BYLINE: Kathryn Balint; STAFF WRITER
BODY:
Go on, admit it: You've searched the Internet
for mentions of your name.
Maybe you're just curious to see if your name
comes up.
Maybe you're vain enough to think that people are actually
talking about you on the Net.
Whatever the reason, you're not alone.
Most Net surfers, at one time or another, simply can't resist plugging their
name into a search engine. It's such a common practice that there's even a
phrase for it: Ego surfing.
"When people reach the point where they're
comfortable with the Internet, where they perform searches in general, they
usually start fooling around and try searching for their name," said Patrick
Dent, a technology writer who also teaches online publishing and Web page
development at the University of Southern California.
And you never know
what might turn up.
La Mesa author Jacqueline Shannon found a namesake
who tirelessly crusades for mental health care reform and another who bills
herself as a dominatrix.
"On the continuum of respectability," Shannon,
the author, said, "I fall somewhere between these two women."
One of her
ego-searching sessions yielded a link to a German site. Shannon was sure it had
something to do with the dominatrix.
But when she clicked, she
discovered that it was Amazon.com's German division, selling her own book, "The
New Mother's Body Book."
When Mission Valley attorney Juan Carlos Fox
searched for his name a few years ago, he thought he might find mention of a
worker's compensation case he had handled.
Instead, found another Juan
Carlos Fox in Boston. The two corresponded for a while.
But, Fox the
attorney said, "We really had nothing in common except an exact same name."
Amateur photographer Harvey Payne of Poway turned up a professional
photographer with the same name when he was ego surfing.
That got him
wondering.
"When you see a picture that says 'Copyright Harvey Payne
2000,' whose picture is it?" Payne asked. "Do I have a right to mark my
photographs in such a manner, since a professional is already doing so?"
Since that fateful Internet sighting, Payne, the amateur shooter, now
signs his work "Harvey G. Payne."
Searching for your own name on the Web
usually inflates nothing more than your ego. For Steve d'Adolf of Poway, it's
his wallet that's getting fatter.
As a hobby, he enters a lot of online
sweepstakes and contests. Usually, if he wins, he gets an e-mail telling him so.
But not always. So, every month or two, he searches for his own name.
In the last three months, he found out that he won a backpack and a
$165 specialty knife.
"I would never have found out I
was a winner if I had not done some ego surfing," d'Adolf said.
'Trying
to find oneself'
The term "ego surfing" started appearing on the Web
about three years ago. And, like its name implies, in the exercise there's more
than a little self-centeredness involved in the phenomenon.
"I have to
admit that I'm guilty of searching for myself in cyberspace," said John Suler, a
Rider University professor who studies the psychology of the Internet.
"Maybe that's what the phenomenon is about: trying to find oneself,
perhaps, as seen through the eyes of others and as recorded by that all-knowing
consciousness that we call the Internet. It's an objectifying of oneself, as if
you are doing research for an article and the subject of the research is you."
He said a person's self-esteem is invested in the process as they find
out if they've been cited in cyberspace or made their mark amid the reams of
digital data.
It's also interesting, he noted, to see what bits of
information about ourselves are floating around out there. Business
transactions. Public records. And communications.
"If all those pieces
of oneself are put together," Suler asked, "is it an accurate image of who one
is? I wonder if someday in the not too distant future that the digitized self
will be considered more important than the actual self."
Jeffrey Rosen
echoes that concern in his recent book, "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of
Privacy in America."
"When intimate personal
information circulates among a small group of people who know us well,
its significance can be weighed against other aspects of our personality and
character," he writes.
"By contrast, when intimate information is
removed from its original context and revealed to strangers (such as on the
Internet), we are vulnerable to being misjudged on the basis of our most
embarrassing, and therefore most memorable, tastes and preferences..."
'Like a road map'
Vanity aside, ego surfing could be key when it
comes to your job.
Shannon, the author, said searching the Net for her
name is "absolutely essential."
She looks for reviews of her latest
book, "The Wedding Dress Diet," and checks to see if her articles have been
reprinted without permission.
"I often find articles that I didn't sell
the electronic rights to," Shannon said.
If you're looking for a job,
ego surfing can be just as crucial when it comes to what potential employers
might find.
"You need to be aware of the activities and statements by
namesakes on the Web," said Dent, the technology writer.
"It's not
unusual to find someone with the same name who has made a plethora of slanderous
or racist remarks."
If you do stumble upon that, he suggests you tell a
prospective employer during an interview that you're aware of the remarks, but
that it wasn't you who made them.
Of course, your own words could also
come back to haunt you.
Those boasts on a message board about your
gambling success, for example,may not go over too well when interviewing for
that bank job.
No matter how damning, or how innocuous, any Web site
that you've created, any message board or newsgroup that you've posted to, and
even any online guest book that you've signed, can leave a permanent, electronic
trail.
When Thelly Reahm of Cardiff searched for her own name, she
expected only her Web page to appear.
What popped up were three pages of
links -- to every single Web site guest book she had ever signed.
Said
Reahm: "We have a trail of where I've been on the Web. It's like a road map."
How to start your search
Bored with mindlessly surfing the Net?
If so, it's time to find the Web's most fascinating subject: you.
Start with a search engine, such as Google or AltaVista.
Type
your name in the search box.
Make sure that you put quote marks around
your name. Without the quotes, the results may yield Web pages that mention your
first name, or last name, but not both names together.
Click on the
links.
If you get a page that's full of text, you can search for your
name on that page.
If you use Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer as
your Web browser, go to the "edit" pull-down menu at the top of the window. Go
to "find in page" or "find (on this page)." Type in your first or last name.
In your search, try several search engines. Each will yield different
results.
Here are a few places to start:
http://www.egosurf.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.dogpile.com
http://www.alltheweb.com
http://www.altavista.com
Also
try searching the archives of the newsgroups at http://www.deja.com.
Click on the link to "search discussions." At least for now, the
database goes back only a year.
GRAPHIC: 2 PICS
| 1 DRAWING | 1 CHART; 1. Jerry Rife / Union-Tribune 2. Roni Galgano /
Union-Tribune 3. Kathryn Balint 4. Laurie Harker / Union-Tribune; 1. Amateur
photographer Harvey Payne of Poway ego-surfed and found a professional
photographer with the same name. 2. Thelly Reahm of Cardiff said she found three
pages of Web links with her name in them, mainly electronic guestbooks that she
had signed at various sites. (7). 3. How to start your search. (7). 8. I surf,
therefore I am -- Finding yourself -- literally -- on the pages of the Web. (1).
LOAD-DATE: December 7, 2000 
