Googling Yourself · 4 April 2008
I am no egomaniac. Unless you ask my wife. Or my brothers or sister. Or just about anybody who knows me well. Seriously though, I am not. Not unless everybody who ever googled himself is an egomaniac.
I remember a few years ago when my brother told me to search for myself on the internet. He said that I could find my address on one of the search engines. I did the search and told the search engine company that I did not want that information to be published. So they promptly took me out of their database. Not that it really matters anymore. Anybody can find out just about any personal information about anybody with the click of a few buttons. I guess that no privacy is a price we pay for the internet.
Being the egomaniac that I am, I like to search for myself every once in a while. I do not look around the house for myself, I just hop onto the internet. I google myself and see what comes up. Nowadays, my websites are at or near the top of many search engine lists when I look for Michael T. Miyoshi and it is gratifying knowing that anybody who wants to read my writing can just google my name and click on the links. That is the good part about the internet.
The bad part about the internet is that it is forever. People think that they can put up images or videos of themselves doing dumb stuff and that they can take them down later when they come to their senses. That is true to a point. What people do not realize that in the time it took for them to realize how dumb they were posting that silly picture or video and take it off of their personal websites, somebody else had already downloaded it and posted it on a different website. Worse yet, modified it and then posted it again. Or worst of all, somebody took a picture or recorded a video of you with a cell phone and uploaded that to the internet without your knowledge.
I do not worry much about posting my musings and damaging my reputation. People either like what I write or not and there are no plagiarizers out there waiting to snatch my words and trying to make them their own. For one thing, I do not follow my Strunk and White book, Elements of Style, well enough for anybody to want to claim my writing as his own. And for another, some of the topics I cover are too odd for others to want to claim.
When you google me, you will not find any unaltered wacky pictures of me on the internet but you might find a picture of my uncle or other famous people who share the name Miyoshi. The reason is not that I am not odd or that I do not do dumb stuff. I just try not to take pictures of me doing dumb stuff. And I certainly do not put them in cyberspace. After all, being the egomaniac that I am, I only want to project the best of me out to the world. Which means that I do not want to find any pictures of me out there when I google myself. Even though I will find a bundle of bad writing.
© 2008 Michael T. Miyoshi
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Published 22 May 2008 in The RiverCurrentNews
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