there are 75 things on "Mike Develin" that google displays as distinct hits without additional prompting. every one of these 75 hits refers to me (take that, paul!) the breakdown of the 75 hits is very curious -- i've always had this web presence, and it's sort of evolved over time to unconsciously match my priorities, so that an estranged parent, for instance, could keep clandestine track of my life via them, not only in events but also in thoughts.
of these 75, 36 refer solely to mike the mathematician. these are generally announcements of talks i've given or cites of papers i've written, this sort of thing. it's almost half. it'll probably go over half relatively shortly. i can't help but think that this transition, along with my graduation, is a reasonable symbol of this thing i keep blathering about, this mike as mathematician instead of person thing.
the next numerous category is the 19 hits which come from friends' pages, either outright links or mentions of me or of things i've said (or written.) these are interesting. about half of these are horribly outdated. the quintessential member of this outdated subset is abe kuo's webpage, which hasn't been updated in almost literally forever. it's interesting for several reasons. most simply, it references something on my webpage which no longer exists, quixotifying the reader.
this is emblematic of a bigger thing, which is that the page is written by someone who i was friends with seven years ago. you can't see that much of it here unless you look closely, but that closer look reveals the sort of person i was friends with seven years ago. right now i can't imagine that it's an accurate representation of what abe is like, and it's probably an even less accurate representation of the things that are important to me and the shared social norms and sentence construction that went along with that period of my life.
it sounds like i'm being pretentious, but these glimpses into the past which are scattered over the web are at the same time eerie and damning. i feel pretty detached from that period of my life, but there are references which on first glance might appear current (except that they all link to my no-longer-existent harvard webpage), and which have almost nothing to do with the person i am now.
i guess people will see what i write in a few years and think the same thing. seeing these traces has brought me a greater understanding of libel laws, because once you write something on the internet, it has a tendency to stick around (indeed, that's the default behavior), and if you're googling someone and you see a story about them on a friend's page, you'll probably take that as a reasonably accurate description of them. perhaps fair in the normal case, but potentially unfairly catastrophic in the made-up case.
these traces are real weird to come across, but not as weird as the 11 activitial links. a few of these are from sps, a couple from bridge, a couple have to do with baseball, a couple with math club, but what they all have in common is that they are jarringly unrepresentative samples of my life. there is no person there -- there is only an activity. there are snippets from sps meetings which i certainly remember as being totally natural in context, but because of the style in which the minutes were written (many by me, of course), they just don't make any sense. they display a more bizarre world than actually happened, although sps was in general pretty eclectic and crazy.
i guess googling someone has the effect of watching a highlight film of their life. sps is sort of an exception, because sps really was fairly representative of the person and life i was in college, but with the baseball and the bridge and whatever, that stuff is just casual. it doesn't come out that way, though -- you picture a person with these specific interests, not a person. and that's the weird part about ego-surfing, that you get this disjointed view of yourself.
nine hits left. three of these are photo pages. three of these are mine. two of these are mike the physicist. there isn't really anything notable about any of these.
the last one is definitely notable. i'll point it to you: here. go read that and then come back here.
there is so much weird stuff about this. i have no idea who this jesse person is. i am astonished that there's another person with my name, especially someone who is actually two degrees of separation away from me! this definitely validates the small-world theory.
note to jesse, if he's reading this: i am in fact the sexually gifted math-genius Develin, not the loser jock Develin who apparently has ZERO PERCENT WEB SHARE. sucker. but, back to the main train of events, it's sort of strange that the one off-hand comment about me has this form. the intrepid googler, finding this ... well i don't know what they'll think, i guess.
enough with the non-points. the point here is really that here's another past incarnation of myself, someone who lives on to the present this time not via the vestiges of former friends but via the memories of present strangers. with the advent of google and the web, all of this crazy shit is floating around (though the infamous eyebrow-piercing article which was the bane of my ethereal existence seems to have disappeared.) my point? loyal readers, i call you forth from the woodwork. write about me. use my full name. because when someone tries to find me, i want them to find me, not the me of seven years ago. (not that this has anything to do with the link, which i include just because it surprised me -- it's not like that really says anything about me, or that anyone reading it will get any sort of inaccurate impression. after all, it's still true: i still know how to solve the cube, though i'm not particularly australian.)
peace out. if the pattern holds, i'll see you in a few weeks.