wickedqueen.net

So last night I was on the phone with a good friend from high school with whom I tend to touch base three or four times a year, which means that this was the first he’d heard about my career-ending mud wrestling injury. I mentioned that there were photos of the match online, and he immediately plugged my name into a Google image search, although if I’d realized he was at his machine I could have just sent him my Flickr link–but if I had, we might never have made this amazing discovery.

A few minutes after he found the relevant photos, there was a long silence on his end. I prodded him verbally.

“Uh, Cabell, are these your boobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“Over this PS3?”
“WHAT?”
“I did a google image search on your name, and there is a headless bust over a PS3.”
“Well, it’s definitely not me; I don’t even HAVE a PS3–where IS this?”
“Google image!”

So I google image searched myself, and sure enough:

I would like to reiterate here that this photo is NOT ME. I know how sometimes people miss these things, like when I went to that strip club on amateur night purely out of sociological curiosity and NOT AS A PARTICIPANT, DAD, but apparently wasn’t clear enough on that point in the initial blog entry.

So, yeah. That photo up there? Not me. It is, however, in the top row of results when you put “cabell gathman” (although not actually with the quotation marks in the search term) into Google image search. The rest of the row consists of the side-by-side of me and Andromeda Sparks (my main CoH avatar), my Flickr user icon, a graphic from January’s winning IAP Games Competition entry (the team for which I was on), and two different photos from Truman State University’s newsletter that do not include me but do seem to be part of coverage of events in which I was involved.

So what’s with the PS3 boobs, you ask? Well, the graphic was originally embedded in an entry of the Electric SistaHood blog’s review section, and ESH once linked to a column I wrote on female gamers for Strange Horizons. As far as I can tell, the particular page in which the actual photo was embedded contained no reference to my name, though, so it seems odd that it comes up so high on the results, except that maybe there are a lot of people google image searching me all the time and that’s their favorite photo?* IT’S NOT ME.

As a researcher of social networking sites, I naturally hear a lot about context and context collision and people who didn’t realize that their parents/professors/employers were going to see that picture of them doing body shots at a party, but I hadn’t really considered the growing possibility of cases like this, where your identifying information may end up linked to bizarre things that have nothing to do with you because you are both connected to some random OTHER thing. Confounding factors!

Which is funny in itself, since this very domain is still inaccessible from many locations that employ internet filtering software because there was a time period during which it was in the hands of pornographers, and so it’s still on a lot of outdated block lists. You’d think I’d have thought about the way that spurious connections might arise out of the vast sea of data that is the internets.** It seems like I am actually LESS likely than most to fall victim to this, because I have a weird freaking name, but on the other hand, when your name is a truly unique identifier, people are probably much more likely to assume that okay, yes, those must actually be your PS3 boobs. (THEY’RE NOT, DAD.)

Probably having publicly admitted to mud wrestling doesn’t help, either, but you know, I’m sorry, that is just how I roll. But I do not now nor have I ever owned a PS3.

(And yes, I know this post is just going to make this search result about a billion times more robust, but at least there’s a chance that people will then click on it and see this blog entry, right? …Yeah, like I believe anyone but me checks the source page.)

—

*If you or someone you know spends a lot of time google image searching me, a) don’t tell me, and b) Matt is going to be totally unsurprised, as he once claimed that I would have the most self-portraits available online of anyone in the world if it weren’t for cam girls.

**John: It’s not just a big truck you can just DUMP stuff in, you know. IT IS A SERIES OF TUBES.

You know those videos people make of themselves where they’ve photographed themselves every day for years and then they set it to spacy music and it’s all artsy and shit?

Here in Alice’s new media literacies class, we’ve decided to call that Time Lapse Narcissism.

I josh, of course. I am hardly one to slam narcissism. Actually, I think this kind of video is a really interesting demonstration of people struggling for a sense of identity continuity–am I the same person over time? Do I have some center that exists outside the sum of experience? How has experience changed me without totally remaking me?

And you know it must speak to something deep in our lizard brains if the advertisers have stolen it in their constant search for “authenticity”:

That’s right! You have a continuous core self! It resides in a mocha latte from Dunkin’ Donuts! Without the latte you are NOTHING!

That ad should really show the guy gradually getting fatter, but I guess advertising rarely goes for COMPLETE authenticity. It also lacks the variety of change markers that the personal video has–slight changes in facial shape (possible weight gain), fairly major changes in hairstyle, a clear move from one apartment to another, etc. The advertisement version presents an overly changeless self–which may be what people want to imagine, but on the other hand, I think it’s less compelling to watch. It’s entertaining, but it is also a lie about time.

Man. Now I feel like I should make one of these. The weight changes alone would be pretty striking, and of course there is my hair.

(Thanks to Cheryl S for the video links!)