Google Stalk

I have been thinking about the accessibility of information at our modern fingertips lately. As a journalist, I use the internet and the various search engines available to me to find out all kinds of information. As an art and music enthusiast, I can look at art that would otherwise be available to me only in books or art museums or try out new bands without leaving the house. There are social networking websites for people with almost any interest, from Myspace to Flickr to Our Chart. And there are blogs, just like this one, that allow us average guys to put out our ideas to the world. And earlier this evening, to my surprise a friend informed me of an underrepresented tool available, the professional Google-stalk.

Okay, who hasn’t looked up an old lover on Google or Yahoo's people search? Tried to find out what a rival from high school is up to ten years later. But this friend, he broke all bounds of etiquette I can think of. He Google-stalked his therapist.

Now I know for myself, as an occasional visitor to the psychiatrists couch, that it is sometimes unbearable to be pouring out your feelings to a person who is there to analyze them and assist you to better cope with your life, when you cannot know a thing about them.

Are they married? Divorced? Gay, Republican, Vegan? Do they have children? Did they play basketball in high school? Were they molested as a child, and if so, how did they end up here in a professional’s chair, instead of in porn? The only thing you do know is they have this degree, but who knows if they have a normal life outside of the office.

People go in an office and talk about their darkest secrets, fears, dreams, their uncontrollable anxiety. While the doctor just listens, occasionally asks probing questions, perhaps engages in role play or primal therapeutic techniques, but what do they do later?

After I spill my guts to the brown haired, makeup free, sensible shoe-wearing intern that was assigned to me because I am too poor to pay for “regular” therapy, does she run home, slip on a red evening gown and salsa dance all night? Can she make good lasagna? Is she in a book club? Does she even like reading?

I think about these things every time I am in the office, but it was not me, who has been trained in gathering information, that on a drunken night had the audacity to type those few words into the computer and hit search. No. It was not me, it was— and I change his name to protect his guilt—Matthew.

It took me all of 30 seconds after the long winded goodbye that “Matthew” and I always have, to up the phone and kick my boyfriend off the computer to type her name in. Those two words that I have uttered so many times in voice messages, or read on her card, seemed so official when looking at me from the computer screen in black with the flashing cursor waiting for more information, or the inevitable mouse click. I stared like a person stares at fresh road kill. What have we done? I thought. To get to this point that personal information is just out there like dirty laundry for all the world to see?

When I Google my name, (which I do occasionally because I am an insatiable egotist,) I find articles I have written, photos I have taken, and a really stupid comment I put on writer/actor/director Zach Braff’s Garden State blog a bunch of years ago. Everything else I am proud of, but that one comment, it just lingers there, like an unsightly birthmark, taunting me. If that were not there, I wouldn’t give two goddamns who looked at my search results. Ugh. It lies there like an ex you never wanted to introduce but had great sex with.

And so it goes. The better the “IT guys” get at refining ways for us to find the old camera we are looking for or to get to a dissertation from a Berkeley History PhD candidate on the Revolutionary War, the easier it is to find naked photos of your neighbor or blackmail worthy information on your editor so you can keep your job that lies on in the teetering on the edge of extinction at the newspaper.

And to what end? Certainly the internet and all its glory can provide exhibitionists and voyeurs a place to play, but what about the rest of us? What about those of us who delight in the mystique of not having the world know our secrets?

I glanced once more at the flashing cursor and realized that if I did this, my next session would be all lies.

I will leave the professional Google-stalk to Matthew. I will stick to exes and bitches from high school.