What’s in a Name?
By Joseph Janes
Wed, 12/07/2011 - 13:00
PrintIf you haven’t googled the word “Santorum,” now would be a good time—otherwise most of what follows won’t make a lot of sense. Fair warning: What you find won’t be pretty (i.e., it will be explicit), but it will be instructive.
Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s examine this phenomenon. The neologism that appears first is certainly vivid and imaginative, and as we learn from the Wikipedia entry that shows up second in my search today, it’s been around for several years, the product of one person’s attempt to shame a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania about his opinions. My opinions, such as they are, of the senator’s views—from which he has not backed away—are beside the point. This is character assassination, in an almost purely literal sense of the phrase, depriving the senator of his name for all intents and purposes, since we all know that these days you are what you Google as.
There’s an intriguingly metaphysical aspect to this as well. Among the debates one uncovers is whether this is an old-fashioned Google bomb (ah, those halcyon days of “miserable failure”). If you think this is an attempt to deceive people about the senator, then it is—but not if you think it’s just a new word being coined. And just how many angels did we decide were dancing on that pin, by the way?
I was planning to write about this whole business anyway, originally intending to connect it to Google’s recent revisions of its algorithm, followed by the elimination of the “+” operator and subsequent introduction of the somewhat-more-feeble Verbatim option. Less than half a percent of searches used the “+,” and two thirds of those were incorrect, says Google, so I guess most of us aren’t in the 99% on this score.
Then, like a gift from the gods, came the story about how Facebook had changed Salman Rushdie’s name on his account to his proper given name, Ahmed. He was understandably peeved, turned to Twitter to call out Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook nomenclature hegemonists, and within two hours got to be Salman again. Yay.
Coverage of this story was sympathetic to Rushdie, while also pointing out the understandable difficulties for internet hosts and providers to determine the real from the fake and the increasing trend of using Facebook in particular to sign in to other services, thus raising the stakes and importance of somehow being able to verify identity online. This also leads to the somewhat worrying prospect that, although Americans have consistently spurned the idea of a national identity card, Facebook might be able to achieve much the same objective through the back door.
Apart from Facebook shooting itself in the foot (yet again), I was struck by how differently some people seemed to treat these two phenomena. It’s okay to, um, savage Rick Santorum’s name, but Facebook should let Salman Rushdie be who he wants to say he is. And we thought name authority was difficult.
As of today, more than 35,000 people had liked the “redefining Santorum” web page, and more than 5,000 had +1ed it on Google. Once something like that reaches critical mass, it’s nigh impossible to do much about it, and Google has firmly said it doesn’t mess with organic results absent illegality, which we should support. Our lesson today, then, seems to be you are who everybody thinks you are, or ought to be, which is great if that’s who you think you are too.
There’s a good old English word for what’s been done to the senator, coincidentally connected to the act in question … but that’s another story.
Joe Janes is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.
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Comments
Great article
I enjoyed reading, reflecting on, and discussing this article with colleagues. Thanks for writing this thought-provoking piece and including it in American Libraries.
They are different
I think these two things are quite different, as other people have already commented.
Facebook seems to have actually changed Mr. Rushdie’s name, in a forum in which he is representing himself. I think Facebook has very odd practices about names (it took my aunt almost a year to changed to her married name). It seems completely inappropriate.
I happen to be a gay man. I happen to not particularly care for the public persona of Mr. Santorum or Mr. Savage. I don’t think Mr. Savage was any more appropriate than Facebook was.
However, the what Mr. Savage has done is essentially call someone a name. I didn’t like that in grade school. I don’t like it now. But the First Amendment, treasured by librarians, is clear here. Mr. Savage can call people names. We not have to approve of that, but he has every right to do it.
Facebook probably has a legal right to change people’s names, but what it’s changing is the name people present to the public.
It feels to me more like a teacher forcing a child to be called by another name in school, because the teacher finds the child’s name hard to say. It’s not exactly like that, of course, but it seems more like that.
I simply can’t understand how you think these two issues are the same or even closely related. While I’m willing to believe that you believe that you’re not representing your views on the Senator, this reads as though you do.
My last thought: seriously, librarians believe that “you are what you Google as”? Isn’t that the opposite of information literacy?
Well, I think they *are*
Well, I think they *are* different phenomena (and I’m outspoken about caring about our rights to be known by our chosen names and handles). The Santorum instance is, as you note, organic — decentralized, the product of an individual (albeit one with a pretty big platform) expressing a point of view and lots of other people cosigning it. The Rushdie instance is about the power of a centralized corporation to set rules for us.
Our reputation has *never* been something that we alone control — that was true before social media and it’ll be true with what comes next as well. Santorum’s reputation is based in people’s reactions to things he’s said, and we’ve never been able to control others’ reactions. But we have been able to control how we introduce ourselves to other people; Facebook yanking that right out from under Rushdie is genuinely surprising, and, to me, alarming.
And again to plumb the non-analogy: Rushdie can introduce himself by whatever name he pleases, but that doesn’t give him control over how others choose to respond to him; in fact Rushdie is one of the highest-profile examples of how others can defined how our identities are *interpreted*. (And again: before social media!) And Santorum’s ability to introduce himself by whatever name he chooses has no bearing on others’ choices to attach additional meanings.
In short, why shouldn’t I treat the phenomena differently? I don’t see what they have in common.
If what Dan Savage did to
If what Dan Savage did to Rick Santorum’s name is character assassination, than so are Santorum’s public, and frequently repeated, descriptions of Dan Savage’s lifestyle as comparable to bestiality and pedophilia. I would say that Santorum assassinates the character of every gay citizen in this country on a regular basis and Dan Savage is merely returning the favor.
I would also say that Dan could claim self-defense, since if by some miracle Santorum is elected President, he has promised to do his level best to roll back every civil rights gain made by the LGBTQ community over the last 40 years.
Senator Santorum has
Senator Santorum has assassinated his own character by publicly stating his opinion that a gay lifestyle is aberrant. When you state your opinion in the public eye you open yourself up to criticism. Many People have unfortunate names and I myself find his incredibly funny. Thanks for the heads up on this neologism!
Sorry to see Dan Savage is responsible
I’m sorry to learn Dan Savage is responsible for this attack on Santorum’s name. I knew nothing about him and was very impressed with his keynote speech at ALA last summer. While I don’t agree with Santorum, I also don’t agree with Savage’s behavior, which you rightly describe as character assassination.
By designating what you’ll
By designating what you’ll find with that Google search as “not pretty,” it’s fairly clear how your homophobia informs your opinion. Former senator Santorum himself is the one whose public statements assassinated his character, as you say, or rather laid bare his character.
Fighting back against political powers who seek to limit personal freedoms and freedom of expression is probably more properly termed resistance or protest, not character assassination. So if in the interest of intellectual freedom, you (or we, as Librarians) are comfortable with letting one powerful voice claim that gay sex is not only unhealthy and aberrant, but also akin to incest, bestiality or pedophilia.
But it's notThe thi
The thing is, it’s not pretty. I was a bit squicked out by that webpage, or more the opening of it, and I have absolutely no problem with homosexuality. The imagery is the issue and he was warning readers of that, for those of us who are weak in the stomach department.
I disagree.
The author said nothing about homosexuality. Automatically assuming that (lower case) santorum is indicative only of homosexual sex may be displaying something of *your* ingrained homophobia.
Thanks!
Thank you for reminding me to +1 that page! Also, very interesting piece.