“and, now that you have my full name, if you google me, I’m NOT the _______ that was shot in the back of the head by a Venezuelan government agent.”

Hey, he’s funny!

“mocassin-walking exercise” refers to walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins/ being in someone else’s shoes.

And if I may quibble, there are charming scoundrels who specialize in the in-person false negative. But they’ve been around way longer than computers, and the computer doesn’t really change their game….

On the subject of the righteousness of Googling, I would start with the following two assumptions: first, our goal is to find a person with whom we would want to spend significant amounts of our precious time; second, when in a love relationship, the worst, the very worst thing, is to talk with one’s partner about important and potentially volatile aspects of that relationship in any way other than in person, preferably holding hands or other body parts if possible. I think the second axiom can be applied to the first–the most relevant data comes from a date, one of the in-person variety. The sooner you get there, the faster you’ll know whether you and a person who has passed your initial cut stand a ghost of a chance of a second date.

And I’m reminded of a line from a Grateful Dead song: “I’d rather be in some dark hollow where the sun don’t ever shine, than be alone in some big city, in a small room, with a girl on my mind.” We have to get out there and actually go on dates. As soon as it seems safe and possible. Anything else is a risk-averse avoidance of human contact based on something only slightly more predictively reliable than the reading of entrails.

Online dating is sort of a misnomer: despite the fact that it can feel quite intimate somehow, it is not a date, although it is a good way to get a date. From a statistical standpoint, it amounts to searching a database for matches in parameter values; these parameters are skewed to yield a high percentage of “false-positives.” When combined with Googling, they yield high percentages of both “false-positives” and “false negatives” because of the unknown reliability of information from the Googling and the human judgment imposed on it, which compounds possible errors.

Compared to that scenario, in-person dating gives very few false positives or negatives. So while the intial cut that online dating/searching yields seems valuable in finding an in-person date, Googling and attempting to read the tea leaves it generates may actually add to the margin of error already built into the OLD process; it certainly delays getting to the most reliable way of making a judgment about who might still love and need you when you’re sixty-four, the divorce rate notwithstanding.

Googling: not creepy.

Googling and pretending you didn’t: A little creepy

Being offended that someone googled you: It’s the 21st century, you silly ostrich!

I knew next to nothing about him – just that he lives not far from me, that he liked my posting of the lyrics to a Joni Mitchell song enough to respond, and that he was man enough to confess he was “feeling about the same way” as our melancholy baby, Ms. Mitchell, in “All I Want.”

And, of course, I knew his e-mail address. Surprisingly, Googling his e-mail address brought me legions of info about this guy, and I liked every thing I saw. If I hadn’t been able to Google him and find out how much we have in common, interest-wise, at least, I never would have agreed to his requested “picture exchange.”

So yeah, I wrote him back, avec pic, telling him I Googled him and liked what I read. Now I’m just hoping he doesn’t think that’s too creepy. But hey, at least he’s seen my picture now. Two in fact. In Craig’sListLand, that makes us about even.

~Karen

PostScript: Googling my e-mail address brings no results.

I don’t mind being googled, if I’m told at the head of the conversation. It can be eerie to hear some new or casual acquaintance use the very same words that pilloried me in a French review four years ago (some phrases just stick in the mind). A thorough googling saves you a lot of small talk. I wish google could do for my family what it does for my so-called career, so I wouldn’t have to talk about them either.