Weekend Assignment: Search for Myself

When I searched for myself online I found just about what I expected to find, nothing.  I don’t have my name on any lease or any bills so when I tried to find myself using an address nothing for me came up.  What was weird though was the fact my parents didn’t even come up when I searched my home address.  Maybe they are trying to keep our life as private as possible.  The demographics of my home town came up just fine when I searched around on the New York Times’ website though.  It was a very typical result, upper-middle class white suburb; my hometown is extremely homogeneous.  When I looked at the different colored dots, it appeared to be nearly one solid color, which is nothing short of what I expected to find.  When I moved away from the sites that were suggested and tried to find myself on the different popular social networking sites I was only able to find myself on Facebook, which makes sense considering Facebook is the only social networking site I use.  I found it odd though that no other “Connor Klostermans” popped up when searching as my name is not totally unique and I have found other Connor Klostermans on Facebook before.  I was surprised I was the only one I found when using Facebook.  When it came to the other social media sites, when I searched my name, nobody else came up, the algorithm told me it could not find anyone who matched my search.  My lack of usage of social media was demonstrated when I tried to search myself.

            When doing random searches of myself on Google I found even less information about myself than when I tried to go the social media tract.  I was able to find two images of myself that was pulled from my Facebook account, but other than that it is like I do not exist on the internet.  The algorithm behind Google thought I kept misspelling Chuck Klosterman and wanted to display him every time I tried to search for myself.  The middle aged writer appears to have a lot more notoriety in the online world than I do and it felt as if the computer was trying to make me know he was a more popular internet sensation than I am. 

            After finding out I did not have much of a presence on the internet several different thoughts popped into my head right away.  The first was am I missing out on anything by not being on the internet as much as my peers are.  Do they get much of a benefit from having the account that is hooked up to the vast knowledge of the internet?  I came to the conclusion though that I am probably not missing out on much.  I have seen different social media accounts that my friends have and I am never impressed by what it has to show them.  More often than not, all the information on it is useless information that is more of a distraction than anything else; it is nothing that I would find valuable and would just eat away at the already limited supply of time I already have. 

            The next thought I had when I realized I was not much of a presence on the internet is that a future employer, or anyone else for that matter, would not be able to find out much about me.  No one would be able to get a detailed pre-conceived notion about me, whether it would be good or bad.  I enjoy the fact that I will be able to make a majority of the first impression for my future acquaintances myself and not through the often misunderstood information online.  So while trying to research myself, I realized even though I am happy with the amount of information on the internet about me, there is always more I could do to make sure nobody is able to get a preconceived notion about myself from the information they might happen to find.