Search and destroy

I Google myself, I confess.

Now it’s time to commit that ultimate act of digital narcissism publicly, in the interests of this article. It’s time to deep-Google myself, and go beyond the first few pages.

Before you put your name into Google’s tool bar and hit ‘search’, what would be the worst outcome? If you are important or famous (the two are often entirely different), what haters lurk online waiting to rip you to cyber shreds? The internet, the most important invention since the printing press, is full of haters. The anonymity makes it a giant petri dish of crazed opinion, and insane insults.

You would not have wanted to be Samantha Brick this month. She’s a former nobody who wrote an unintentionally hilarious piece for the Daily Mail on how being so good looking is hard work because other women hate her.

Her article resulted in her trending on Twitter for a day, and not in a good way. If I were Samantha Brick, I would by now have had facial reconstruction surgery and be on a witness protection programme. Her response in the Mail the following day was that the scorn proved she was right; Tweeters claimed this scorn was directed at Brick’s delusional egocentricity and was not motivated by unsisterly jealousy (the loudest scorners were male, doubting the validity of her claims.)

What if you are not hated? What if you are not loved? What if — and this is the worst outcome — you are not even noticed? What if you don’t exist online?

That’s why we are all on Facebook and Twitter, to create a digital version of ourselves that can communicate with other digital versions of ourselves, even if these other selves are our mothers or workmates.

Without an online profile, even if it’s only a few Flickr photos of your trip to Ballybunion, you might as well be dead. Everyone wants an online presence, no matter how obscure — and it’s possible. All internet activity leaves a digital footprint, but it is our own footprint that so intrigues.

A study by the University of St Gallen in Switzerland concluded that “self-Googling can be seen as a form of narcissism, which may help to explain the phenomenon of people searching and browsing the web for information about themselves. Ego-surfing, Ego-googling, self-marketing or vanity searching are different names for the same practice of harnessing the internet’s vast data-collection powers to dig up information about oneself.”

We’re getting more narcissistic. According to US trend monitor Pew Research, 57% of adult internet users regularly look themselves up online, compared with 47% in 2006. The downside is that it is like opening a door to a room where everyone tells you how crap you are. Yet we foolishly persist.

“The reason people search for themselves is that they’re curious about what other people see when they search for their name,” says Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management. “One problem is they don’t have any control over the search results. Either they don’t like the search results, or what happens most of the time is they’re not listed on the first page. If your name is Brian Jones and you’re not the deceased Rolling Stones guitarist, you don’t exist.”

So — time for ego-surfing. I type in ‘suzanne harrington’ and 3,570,000 possibilities pop up in 0.22 seconds. This might seems a lot, until you consider ‘lady gaga’ turns up 98,800,000 in 0.13 seconds. I stare back at myself from a few thumbnails taken for articles I’ve written, and one that I took myself for Twitter. Alongside the pictures of me are several strangers who have stolen my name. Hold on, what’s this? Suzanne Harrington on Facebook? Surely not. There are five Suzanne Harringtons on Facebook, none me, which feels like identity-theft.

I scroll down. There are articles I’ve written — no surprise, given that it’s my job. There’s also a link to MySpace that isn’t me. There’s a link to a blog that is me, one that I keep forgetting to upload. A Linkd In page. All the usual stuff. Nothing frightening so far — no Pandora’s boxes full of trolls and haters — but I am a long way from the Daily Mail territory of Samantha Brick or Liz Jones. There’s a lot to be said for not being famous or important — you don’t get trashed.

In between finding Suzanne Harringtons who are Stanford University professors, sell real estate in Dallas, are trademark experts in Sydney, teach yoga in Wisconsin, and a few Suzanne Harringtons with extra surnames attached to theirs, I keep popping up. There’s SuzHarrington on Twitter, who is not me, then another smattering of articles, randomly selected by Google, plus a syndication site that allows you to buy my stuff for your newspaper in Tasmania or Ottowa or other faraway English-speaking places. Still no trolls.

Goddamit, I’m just too nice. There’s a thread on a website which spends four pages talking about something I wrote about alcoholism, and not one person is anything other than earnestly complimentary. You have to be far more well-known/controversial/interesting/successful to get a groundswell of reaction online — being properly famous while Googling yourself would be terrifying. Or as Reese Witherspoon says “It’s an affirmation of every horrible feeling you have about yourself.”

You can be overly masochistic. Robbie Williams, not known for his emotional stability, prints off the nasty stuff when he Googles himself — but why? Dominic West goes one further, although you suspect his motives may be less masochistic, more playful — when he finds people trashing him online, he joins in the chat, to defend himself. “I use my own name but no-one ever believes me,” he says.

You’d not want to get into an online slanging match — far better to remain aloof. After Googling pages and pages of myself, I finally find a troll — someone who says they don’t give a **** about my stupid ****ing life and why don’t I just **** off and shut the **** up. Wow. Never mind that it’s from years ago.

Reader, I feel validated. At last, someone has been horrible about me online. I exist.