Are you a member of the Googling classes?

The world is now so firmly divided into people who Google everything and those who rarely think of it that it’s almost become an alternative definition of intelligence. I was sitting on the tube the other night facing somebody wearing a security pass for an educational institution. It had their name and picture on it. They’d made no effort to conceal it. They got off at my station. With nothing else to do while waiting for the bus I looked on the web on my iPhone, entered just their title and first name plus the name of the institution into Google and within a couple of seconds I had their CV. I do things like that because I’m a nosy hack but it would be just as easy for somebody who wished to steal their identity. The person who would probably be most disturbed by this prospect would probably be the person who didn’t make the basic effort to conceal the pass in the first place. If they were in the Googling classes they would make sure they hid it.

This post actually starts with a story of someone who had been wondering for a while about how to get in touch with her father who she’d never met. She’d managed to trace his name but nothing more.

Then someone suggested Googling him and there he was…

More people have web shadows than know it. And many more have a sense that they have a web presence, but don’t connect it with the power of search engines and social networks to unearth information about them.

Just because you are aware of Google and use it doesn’t mean you use it to find information about people. Yet. The behaviour isn’t familiar to everyone yet, they think of it as a work or study tool, not an extra sense, a kind kind of intelligence, as David puts it.

Soon we will all be members of what David calls “the Googling classes” and it is going to make us think differently about everything from showing our name tags to leaving reviews on websites under our own names.