The View From Kalamazoo

Is Google, and not blogging, the real issue at the heart of the Tribble Drivel? (found at Coffee Grounds)

Yes, and no.

If you Google me you’ll run into my blog, sure, and opinion columns I wrote for the school paper lo those many years ago. And papers I had put up, again, a decade ago that have since taken on a life of their own (including my undergraduate thesis. my graduate thesis you’ll have to find at the university library, sorry. not that you really want to..). And references to me in my capacity as the Great Herder of Cats. And archived listserv emails, and who the heck knows what else – I’m all over the place and there would be no eradicating my electronic presence whether or not I blogged under my own name (which I do on principle, if that means anything), whether or not I blogged at all. I would not put my URL on official, application data (I’m still not sure who would put a road map to a personal blog on their materials, frankly), but that didn’t stop a ‘whole department’ from, en masse, becoming readers.

My question is this, for all of you on various and sundry committees who have the habit or practice of Googling applicants: Did you, say 5 years ago, regularly Google your applicants? Regularly run a LexisNexis search on applicants to check for any letters to the editor, perhaps?? Did you, instead, look at the contents of their dossier, the materials submitted expressly for you to consider??!?

At what point did it seem appropriate to cross lines, muddy boundaries, scootch personal ethics to the side? If it wasn’t a practice then, why is it so fashionable now??