Googlenomics

Here is a great article discussing Google, it's published by Wired and really well written by Steven Levy.

My friends sometimes chuckle a little when I tell them how important it is that they get a good sense of how easily they can be "googled." I try to tell them that it's in their best interest to create as best they can the conditions where they are the first person that pops-up when someone searches their name.

I am quoting Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire here (45):
"What needs to be addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as local. The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather effects of a regime of production."

I think that many folks, my friends included, resist the idea that they be easier to find because they harbor a certain false sense of anonymity such that what is most valuable is this false sense of privacy. What they fail to realize is that interiority and the ability to be triangulated are not at odds with one another.

Negri and Hardt, I think, nail it when they state:
"Globalization, like localization, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really homogenization and heterogenization. ... It is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire. ... The globalization or deterritorialization operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localization or reterritorialization, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy." (45)