Sunday, August 7, 2011

On your deathbed, will you Google yourself?

I was kinda wondering that lately. Everybody in America googles themselves. I myself am surprised by what comes up. Really random things. I play-tested a board game my brother published, and he gave me a credit. I can’t seem to shake that from the top ten.

It’s really surprising because even my top e-mailed stories, my Sunday centerpieces – and my paper has hundreds of thousands of readers – never seem to come up. Instead, I get an obituary for an old appliance salesman I wrote really late one night. I get a story from a paper I used to work for, years ago; a not so big story that took me a couple hours to write. It's not worth explaining: a no-comment reaction to a conviction.

So I just don’t know. How do you create a legacy in digitalville, when it all seems so random? Legacies are out of your control, and they should be. Should it all be up to an algorithm? Maybe.