Branding your name

I just saw the trailer for Google Me, a film about a guy named Jim Killeen who travels all over the planet to meet other Jim Killeens he finds from a Google search of his name. This concept is so interesting to me since I’m sure millions of other people have often wondered what other people with their names were like in person. I haven’t entertained this notion since I’m pretty sure I’m the only Eleazar Cruz Eusebio alive on the planet today. At least, that’s what Google tells me.

So, the idea of branding your name in cyberspace is probably bigger than we realize. I remember the advent of the internet and now it seems to be branching into unknown territories, where nothing is really private anymore. I know this because I’ve subscribed to a lot of online social networks and noticed how so many of them have popped up frequently becoming top websites and cultural phenomenas.

Take Facebook, Myspace, and the now antiquated, Friendster. These popular social networks have connected and re-connected tens of millions of people, all with the same goal in mind. Whomever came up with the notion first was pure genious. The hundreds of spin-offs are all just different variations of the same idea. Now, we have thousands of ways to track one another. Is the future of our personality now downloadable as a product with, perhaps, our ISP numbers becoming more valuable than our social security numbers.

So, as a challenge to the mass media that is the internet, I will try to remain as true to myself and my intentions as I continue to subscribe to the world as we know it online. My mission is to remain a private citizen with a private life so that no one can simply find a blurb about me and make offset assumptions to draw their own conclusions. I guess this whole thing has taken a lot of mystery out of society. People now feel as though they know celebrities and royalty by whatever they read about on TMZ.

The exchange of the modern information world is fascinating. I only hope that the future of our world, including our children and their childrens’ worlds, will remain pristene and true. For living in an online world is just one plane to the universe’s plan for us. There is only a healthy and an unhealthy dose that society can take and the line is becoming more and more unclear with the advent of smart phones and netbooks. Can we take the good found in inter-connectivity (e.g. GPS navigation, email, videos on demand) and leave behind the rubbish? We’ll have to wait and see.