Do We Really Need To Know Who’s Googling Us?

It used to be you had to wait until you had ringing ears to know someone was thinking about you, but these days you can get an email alert any time someone Googles your name. Ziggs.com, a new social networking site, invites people to create profiles and promises to give them a top position in all search engines for $4.95 a month. Members get instant email notifications every time a visitor views their profiles via search engines like Google, even alerting them of the visitor’s location. This sort of thing just smacks of all kinds of wack, from encouraging rampant narcissism, to creating the modern day “waiting for his call” syndrome, as well as making people wonder about their exes way more than necessary. 

Anyone who has a blog and checks his or her stats regularly knows that feeling when an ex’s work place ISP pops up in the list of recent visitors. There’s a visceral reaction that, depending on circumstances, can open old wounds, create false hope, and stir up old romantic feelings that probably ought to stay dormant. Aren’t relationships and dating complicated enough already? Hasn’t modern technology and the new avenues of communication and connecting shaken our mental stability enough already?  Do we really need one more thing to analyze in determining whether someone may or may not be interested us?

I can just see it now: a new member of Ziggs.com is having Happy Hour drinks with a friend one evening after work and says after taking a sip of her gin and tonic, “I got an email alert earlier that someone in New York Googled me today,” 

“Who do you think it was?” her friend will ask, to which the Ziggs member might rattle off a list of exes, guys she met at a party last week, and even potential employers. Maybe she’ll even convince herself she’s being stalked.

Isn’t it all too much? Isn’t it time to regain some self-control and dignity and declare we’ve had enough? After all, we still have our ringing ears and they’re even free.