Recently, the Toronto Star's public editor wrote about people who want their letters to the editor unpublished because they're googleable.
My question: who are these people? This is really a unique convergence of factors. They are people to whom it occurs to write a letter to the editor, they are savvy enough to write a letter to the editor that gets selected for publication, they are completely unaware of the fact that a letter to the editor would become googleable, and they are affected by the fact that their letter (and the opinions contained therein) are googleable.
How do all these factors manage to converge? The combination of inclination to write a letter to the editor and unawareness of how googleability works makes me think of people who are very old and technologically illiterate, but would these people be affected by the googleability of their letter? I mean, my own parents are senior citizens and they know how googleability works, so those who are unaware of it would be, like, octogenarians and above, most of whom aren't in the workforce or any other situation where the googleability of their opinions would have any impact.
Also, they don't print truly extremist positions in letters to the editor. If someone wrote in with hate speech or something, it wouldn't get printed. But one of the reasons cited for requesting a letter to be unpublished is professional repercussions for the political views expressed. Jobs where people would suffer repercussions for political views sufficiently benign to be printed in a letter to the editor are generally the sort of job that requires some degree of savvy and nuance - the sort of thing where you'd think people would need to know how googleability works in order to function properly at their job. So how did they get there?
I really want the newspaper to interview these people (even if anonymously) and tell us their stories. How did all these factors converge?
2 comments:
You've neatly unpacked why this is so strange.
Could they be people who are anti-Google, but not anti-internet? I know some people who don't use Gmail and try not to use any Google products.
I was using "googleable" as a generic - any search engine would do.
Although it seems like if someone is going to be anti-Google, they'd have to first be aware of what Google can do.
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