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Has anyone decided what to call obsessive web searching for one's own name? Safire's retiring, perhaps his successor will figure it out. I offered "Egosearching" and "Search-in-Vain Engine," but those fall flat on my ears. [I wrote about all this in one of my early posts--which I'm too lazy to link to.] Wired listed a word for this habit in a sidebar back in 1995 or '96, I'm certain, but I've long forgotten what the name was. Whatever word their clever-minded tech-culture writers invented, it didn't stick. It's funny, because most everyone does it, but what do we call it? Nomenbation? Too complicated. Noogling? Sounds good, but already taken. Narcisearching? I don't know. Perhaps we'll figure it out.
Anyway, the other day, as usual, I googled myself, just to make sure I still existed, and lo and behold, I'd taken part in something years ago I knew nothing about. It happened in March of 2001, and somehow, after more than three years, the mysterious trawling spiders found it. (I thought Google found everything weekly, but I guess it takes three years for me.)
Evidently, some things of mine that were published in the golden-tinged days of 2000 were included in a class syllabus. Perhaps they were simply listed as a resource, a supporting text; maybe they were photocopied and passed from row to row. Or maybe, just maybe, someone read them aloud. But for a few hours in March of 2001, my work was part of a college curriculum. It doesn't matter what class (graduate art history), what school (a Seven Sister), or what I wrote (not saying); it made me happy, to find some vestige of it displayed, here in my little cubicle. An artifact of a former self, reinforcing that perhaps, yes, I do exist, or, at least, I did.
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