When I first had an article published to the web and a photo of myself appear online I was ecstatic, "Hey look I can Google myself!"
I'm lucky to have a pretty unique name. To date, there are no other exact matches to "Vanessa Turke" online that belong to another woman (unless you count the descriptions of Turkish girls named Vanessa).
This means if you Google me, you can follow my tracks. Some news articles have faded away (or been removed over the years), but a searcher could get a pretty good idea of what I've been up to in the last 7 years and how I've felt about it. This did not trouble me 5 years ago (when it just seemed kinda cool), but it's starting to worry me a little now. I'm not just a list of results, I no longer even associate myself with some organizations and causes, but these past searches bother me because I had no voice of my own in these articles. Sure there were reports where I was quoted, "Turke maintains a positive attitude". I endure and I maintain. The web doesn't expire - and forever is pretty permanent.
There has been a transformation. In the past, information about me was reported by someone else, usually someone who didn't know me well and people who were more interested in reporting a fabulous, dramatic tale. I had little control about what they had decided to say about me (even the fact checkers got it wrong!) What's changed? Now most of the results, the pieces of cyber-debris are written and reported (tweeted, blogged, uploaded) by moi. Now I only have myself to blame for gross exaggeration and falsehoods.
Long live social media!
