There are various names, are there not, for the act of running your name(s) through a Google search: vanity googling, auto-googling, and so on. I do this from time to time, looking in particularly for any citations of my work and also, of course, the possibility that someone has started a hate-blog about me (some strange part of my mind remains ever fourteen; one can never be too vigilant).
A little while ago I came across this article, written for a 2001 issue of a periodical then newly online. My contribution was extracted from the first chapter of my then-recently-submitted thesis, and its publication a chance to share a part of a trawling of my field that I thought would likely never see the light of day elsewhere, on account of its length.
In the present I was taken aback, in particular, by the confidence of my self-penned author bio, not least my describing of myself as “an academic” when all I had to my name was a not-yet-defended PhD and two fixed-term, part-time teaching jobs, one of which was in the new-to-New Zealand-universities area of non-academic teaching. Indeed, looking back at my applications for funding and for employment from that time more generally, I am taken aback at my confidence of tone concerning both myself and my abilities, a product, I suspect, of residual hopefulness that I would be employable in my field, and of the necessary bluff of the well-turned curriculum vitae.
There’s more, though, and it’s that my self-google brought me that article online for the first time. The article itself was pulled from publication before the volume in which it was to appear came out. That occurred, at the last, at my choice and in response to concerns of other contributing authors. I could have held my ground but I wanted to retain the goodwill of others, and I didn’t have time to prepare for my upcoming thesis defence and complete the editing that the objections of which I heard strongly suggested (but which was never, if I recall correctly, directly requested). That’s the way these things go, and it was indicative, I suppose, of the newness of online academic publishing eight years ago that the article remains online as an orphan page, not linked to from the edition itself, but able to be rediscovered by me in my idle vanity search.
In the years immediately subsequent, mired in difficulty and misery (the possibility of whose future existence my hopeful confidence of that year would simply have overridden in my mind), I wished dearly that I had insisted on the publication of my article, and taken to my curriculum vitae the value it would have brought. It was a different time, however, and I hadn’t yet tasted the academic job market in the raw. And there it remains, online, strange token from the past, a minor monument to my hope and my hubris from those days now distant.
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Posterous
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I find this quite poignant and it also makes me hate academia (more than usual!) There is so much mediocre dead-weight to be found in Universities and so many people who get by almost entirely on their abilities at self promotion or on just having been in the right place at the right time. It makes me angry that someone as intimidatingly accomplished and brainy as you should have been put through the meat-grinder and I feel angry for all of the young, hardworking, talented hopefuls who are going to be crushed in the future- and for those of us who have survived it, thus far, but who will always carry scars (um- it’s possible some of this maybe more about my issues than about you;))
It was a poignant rediscovery for me, finding this article, but then I did wonder if I was laying it on a bit thick as I wrote about it! Looking back, I’m struck by the way in which my successes as a postgraduate came relatively easy, which is not to say I didn’t have to work hard but rather that there weren’t the various external impedimenta that characterise the academic job hunt red in tooth and claw. I’m also aware of the way in which I lacked–and indeed, still do–the pure mental toughness to really get out there, looking-for-work-wise. I wanted to stay in New Zealand or Australia, I valued location as much as the institution, and by the end of my PhD I had lost the zest for self-promotion that makes I think a well-prepared combatant on the job market.
Issues a-plenty!