This log's name made it into Google.

Hoo-zah.

Spontaneity is discovered not through action but through refraining from one's habitual action and seeing what happens next.
— Stephen Mitchell

Be spontaneous today.

Check Box

Last week, the Gray Lady warned her readers about Google digging up the dirt on them for anyone with a Web browser:

The gradual erosion of personal privacy is hardly a new trend. For years, privacy advocates have been spinning cautionary tales about the perils of living in the electronic age.

But it used to be that only government agencies and businesses had the resources and manpower to track personal information. Today, the combined power of the Internet, search engines and archival databases can enable almost anyone to find information about almost anyone else, possibly to satiate a passing curiosity.

...

These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.

Only after setting the tone thusly, the author explains that most of the data found through a search is already part of the public record, "having been printed in newspapers, school newsletters, yearbooks and the like. In addition, the government records that are moving online... are already public." Granted, they admit that "much of that kind of information used to be protected by 'practical obscurity': barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information." Still, it's not as if any of this information had been treated as confidential: anyone who did the legwork would eventually find the goods.

Wondering what could be found on myself, did a vanity search and was both glad and somewhat disappointed at not scoring in the Google court. Google's search reported about 322 results, which were on other people that share my name. Quite understandable: haven't made the papers, Mexico's government records haven't moved to the Internet as quickly, and have a fairly common name. From the Web pages where my person is truly involved, someone could only learn that I'm an ostentatious Blade Runner fan and a reader of The Invisibles without grammatical restraint. Not too revealing, but still embarrassing.

P.S.: Is the vanity search back in vogue? After doing my own search found Omelet had also looked up her Web tracks. Her findings were more flattering than mine.

One of my pet peeves for the past year has been how often people misuse Marshall McLuhan's phrase, "the medium is the message"; whether it's yet another essay that mangles his ideas, or people on mailing lists telling me that "the automobile is not a medium", someone is always making claims in reference to McLuhan that are way out of line with what he actually wrote. If I had a penny for every time I read an essay that concluded with an "improvement" on Mcluhan's "the medium is the message", I'd have a year's worth of micropayments.
— Dru Oja Jay, McLuhan's Message Clarified

Uh-oh.

Will argue in self-defense my post claimed "no ill will to Mr. McLuhan" before attempting that "improvement" business: "the weblog is the medium, not the message." So what did Mr. McLuhan mean with his overly-quoted medium/message phrase? Dru Oja Jay allows McLuhan to explain himself:

...the "content" of any medium is always just another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, "What is the content of your speech?," it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of thought, which is itself nonverbal."

...the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work or leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium.

Therefore, the weblog is the message. Owe Mr. Jay his micropayment.