I Spy With My Google Eye

The internet is like an idle-employee-by-the-coffee machine, waiting around to stoke things up a bit.
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by Hemangini Gupta

(March 23, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) In 1808, I would probably have met my prospective groom straight at the wedding fire, while looking numbly at his toes and shackled by a eighty garland. In 2008, however, I have enough time to research the Prospective and engage in coercive diplomacy until familial opinion bends to my whims. So two months ago, when scheduled to meet a corporate lawyer who lives in New York, I was well-prepared.

My mother advised me to keep an open mind. My former colleagues prepared a list of things I should look out for. And all my friends said the same
thing: “Did you Google him?”

Thing is, I had.

Google showed up two relevant links. An obtuse college reference and a website maintained by irate New York waitresses displaying a list of customers who tipped the lowest. Mr Prospective made the list, having parted with a tip that was a measly 0.5 percent of the bill amount.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to meet him anymore. But here he was in front of me, and every vaguely clever thing he said was diluted by my parallel thought trail — What did low tipping indicate? Was he a miser? Might it have a libidinal resonance? The meeting went nowhere.

The Internet search engine is an idle-employee-by-the-coffeemachine, waiting around to stoke things up a bit. It delves into your most mundane experiences — a harmless meal out, for instance — to throw up a discouraging fact or two.

It does injustice to the best of us. It even brings up the oddest things about me: an embarrassing incident from the past I wish I had never blogged about. Onceit was mentioned in passing at a first encounter. I melted, imagining a sincere trawl through 295 blog posts in an effort to know me better. Soon enough, the harsh truth hit home: it would only have taken a desultory scan for the information to show up.

Running a quick name search is almost a universal precursor to every meeting — acquaintances passing through your city; potential employers; even sky-diving instructors. My friend Googled a prospective sky-diving instructor recently and was led to his web album where a photograph from a few weeks ago was titled “My First Diving Class”.

Despite its snitch-value, I wouldn’t entirely discount an Internet scan. In the US, frantic online name searches before a blind date have often thrown upsex offenders. A week ago, alert hotel receptionists in Scotland noticed something odd about a guest and ran a query for his name on the Internet — only to discover that he was wanted by the police.

At a time when personal relationships are giving way to Internet interactions, Google is the new neighbourhood grapevine — meaty chatter filtered technologically to match your search. So discount it, devalue it, don’t go by it — but probably best not to entirely ignore it.
- Sri Lanka Guardian