Digital culture can be narcissistic, and one practice in particular embodies its most common form: egosurfing. The word was coined in 1995, in a “Jargon Watch” column for Wired magazine by Gareth Branwyn and described the habit of looking up your own name in search engines—and quite possibly devoting many hours to surfing the results.87
Egosurfing has gone by several other names in its time, from vanity surfing to autogoogling, but it’s the idea of “ego” that probably best summarizes the tendency. Originally simply the Latin word for I, ego’s modern sense of self-obsession is taken from the eighteenth-century metaphysical notion of the “egoist” as someone who believes there isn’t necessarily anything in the world apart from themselves—a usage that in due course gave rise to the common sense of an egoist as someone selfish.
If you are an egosurfing egoist, today, one potential obstacle to your self-delight is encountering a Googleganger: a play on the word doppelganger, meaning someone else who shares your name and thus threatens to turn egosurfing into an investigation of someone else’s life. If, for example, you happen to be called Tom Cruise but are not the famous actor of that name, you’ll find it extremely difficult to egosurf effectively, thanks to the millions upon millions of results relating to the actor that any search for your own name will reveal.
Even if you don’t have a globally famous namesake, Googlegangers can be a source of confusion in an age when other people are likely to look you up online as a primary source of information. Potential errors of conflation are compounded by the existence of sites and services that automatically compile information taken from search terms, and might thus mix together the details of four or five different people’s lives if they shared the same name.
Finally, if you’re looking for a broader indictment of the self-serving tendencies of the internet, the author and tech-skeptic Andrew Keen has been one recent advocate of “digital narcissism” as a phrase for our times. The heart of this process, as Keen describes it, is an “emptying out” of our inner selves by the constant pressure of self-broadcasting through social media: a modern echo of the legend of Narcissus himself who, having fallen in love with his beautiful reflection in a pool of water, starved to death. A cheerful image to bear in mind for those devoted to the eternal sunshine of their Facebook accounts.88