HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KID: TAKING BACK MY NAME ONLINE

Everyone has Googled themselves at least once. Sometimes you dig up old regrettable Myspace photos (oh god, no) or- huzzah!- that piece of work that you did for that one thing has earned a justified place on page 2 of Google's results. Currently the third result for my name is from a posting of a small ukulele concert I did in Portland almost three years ago, so that in itself is quite remarkable. 

Google begins keeping running a digital archive of our name whether we like it or not, and odds are that by some point, we won't be the only ones looking up our names. 

Someone in Australia who is a professional pole vaulter shares my name. An opinionated soul that Tweets as "SunshineHitler" shares the same name as my friend Ashley. It's a weird, cruel world, but we're in charge of at least some of the references of our namesakes.

I stumbled across a student blog by a name I barely recognized. I had to scour my email to remember her, but sure enough, I had done an interview with this woman about five months ago, talking about my position as co-editor-in-chief of Her Campus Oregon. It was a light piece, obviously for an entry-level journalism class and for discretion I won't disclose the name of the student or university. She wanted to know about my responsibilities, what I thought of the publication and its direction. Standard stuff, and it was evident why I hadn't remembered it. However, I put a lot of time into my responses so she'd have a good piece, and so I wouldn't come off as a complete "ding dong head," as one of my favorite previous bosses would say. 

When I came across this article, we're talking deep into the archives; 4+ page shit, and I'm not even sure if it's still up there. Class blog pieces are typically private, only accessible to the student body and faculty at the hosting university, but if I could see this article, then odds are so could everyone else. And it wasn't that anything negative or vastly misconstrued was said.

But as I read this Q&A piece, direct quotes allegedly said by me were completely inaccurate- words I would never use, phrases that sounded far too neat, cookie-cutter and rehearsed to have ever come from me. And I double checked my email for the responses I sent, and none of these direct quotes were from there. That's another point; this interview was done online, so she easily could have copy and pasted the responses. So why didn't she?

Well, maybe for aspiring journalists, everything must be just so. You have a certain angle for your paper, and you don't want to drive away from that. You want your sources to sound legitimate and as professional as possible. I talked about the situation with a few of my journalist friends, and they said in student work they've heard of others fudging quotes once or twice, because no one really reads it other than the teacher. But directly quoting someone incorrectly is a different concept, and a total noob move; it's bad, unethical journalism.

So why am I upset by this?  Its audience is pretty limited. It's pretty obvious it's a student piece, and it doesn't say anything negative or vastly untrue about me. But there's something deeper that feels wrong- the fact these are my words, and at the end of the day, it's one of the only thing I can own. I felt like a kid throwing a tantrum when my first thoughts were "that's not fair! It's her grade but my life!" Changing my words means changing my identity without my permission. And I have little to no control over that. I haven't even reached the real world, and yet I'm still having to combat issues with my online image. 

I'm not going to kick up a fuss about it because honestly, it's not worth it. I hope she got a good grade and hopefully learned not to make the same mistake again. I can't think of any of my brilliant aspiring journalist friends that would deliberately make the same error, and that gives me hope. It also makes me weary of interviews overall, and maybe I should be more proactive in the future on following up on those. I haven't been in a position before where anyone really cared to hear about my life, but now that I'm taking more roles and presence, more people are looking.