Here’s gazing at you, kid

I have a colleague (I’ll call him Jerome) who graduated just this past March. He keeps a blog, one he’s been writing since his student days, and he wrote in it recently about Googling his own name. Sure enough, he came upon the personal sites of some of his current students. He then posted excerpts of what they said about him. (The reviews seemed positive.)

In the comments section, many weighed in. A handful called Jerome a stalker, but then these were his friends, and the comments were made in jest. Others found it surprising that a teacher would Google his own name. One girl said she often Googled her teachers’ names when she was a student, but was surprised, and a little creeped out, that Jerome had searched for his own name on the Internet.

Being a teacher who periodically Googles his own name, I wondered: Why is it a surprise that a teacher does so?

Yet I shouldn’t really wonder. It seems to take students a great leap of the imagination to realize that the technological tools available to them are also available to us. My fellow English teachers and I still catch the occasional “dumb” plagiarist: the one who simply lifts entire passages from pages on the Web, and who is caught with the same tools that allows him to cheat in the first place (a computer, Internet access, Google, half a brain). The plagiarism detectors in our minds are particularly active at that time of the year when research papers come pouring in.

If a student can search on the Web for what’s been said about a teacher, why is it surprising that the same teacher can surf the Web for the very same reason? The student wants to know what others think of the teacher. The teacher wants to know, too. (I wrote in the comment thread to Jerome’s post that I, too, have Googled my own name. Oddly, all conversation stopped cold after that, an occurrence that led a friend to christen me “Exie the Thread Killer.”)

So, yes, I Google my name on occasion, because if people are saying things about me in the wide-open expanse of the Internet, I want to know.

And what have I found? Announcements of prizes I’ve won in a few writing contests. (Yes, a few organizations that hold such contests have seen fit, in fleeting but serious lapses of judgment, to award me prizes for things I’ve written.) A handful of blogs, mostly of friends. And, most interestingly, comments about me on forums such as Atenista.net and PinoyExchange. I like this one from ReggieBlue, a forum for all things Atenean, the best. It comes from “bumbler_4264” (Oh, the joys of Internet anonymity!). I haven’t changed a word or even a punctuation mark (though the composition teacher in me truly, truly wants to):

Hes the type of teacher that you curse throughout the semester (Lord smite Abola) but look back on as the one you enjoyed the most. Sir Exie is definitely not for the faint of heart but if you’re up for the challenge then hes ready to give you one.

Not bad, as compliments go. One spoken through gritted teeth is better than none at all.

Another reason for the surprise seems to be a reversal of perspective, one quite unanticipated. The Internet Age, in which we undoubtedly live, has given us a tremendous opportunity for self-empowerment. Didn’t Time magazine choose, as its Person of the Year for 2006, “You”? Not anyone in particular, just “You.” Perhaps on the heels of YouTube.com’s tremendous success and its sale for upwards of a billion and a half dollars (the GDP of a small country), the magazine gave this popular award to that real but nebulous entity known only as You. After all, these days it’s all about You. On the Web, on TV, in print, it’s all about making “You” happy. So the Internet and its related technologies — laptops, broadband, Wi-Fi, digital cameras, camera phones — now allow the user (You!) to broadcast himself or herself to the world with little effort at little cost. Self-publishing, self-promotion, self-exposure.

But exposure means exposing oneself to an audience. And how much thought do we actually give, when we write in our blogs or post our pictures on those social-networking sites, to this question: Who is watching us? The Internet can lull us into a kind of complacency over what we consider private. How often are we aware that the tools that empower us are also those that expose us to prying eyes?

So the surprise the student feels in hearing of the teacher who searches for his own name on the Web results not just from realizing, belatedly, that someone else has access to the same technology, but also that the act he was participating in — The Gaze — was being turned upon himself.

The act of gazing involves two parties: the one gazed at, and the one who gazes. If the Internet empowers the former to parade himself before an unsuspecting world, it also empowers the latter to observe, with tools more sophisticated than ever, whomever he wishes.

And we live, too, in the Age of The Gaze. Not that the act of gazing is anything new. We’ve been gazing at celebrities for years. On 30-foot-high cinema screens, in glossy magazines, on TV, actors have been the object of a fascinated audience’s gaze for a long time. It’s been said that we live in the Age of Celebrity, a time when people have become famous for nothing more than being famous. (Think of Paris Hilton and her vacuous ilk.) The Internet has only intensified this act of gazing. Trawl the Web for images of celebs, male or female, in various stages of dress (or undress), and you risk whiling away hour after unproductive hour. (Better not do this on your employer’s time or dime.) Photos of Jessica Biel taking her garbage out of the house. Britney Spears getting into a car. Jessica Alba walking down a street. It’s staggering how many people have invested so much of their time and attention into paying attention to other people. (Don’t these people have lives? I’ve often wondered as I pore over the very images I told myself I shouldn’t waste my time looking at.)

Could it be that we have two deep desires, to be gazed at and to gaze, that the Internet gives play to wonderfully? The desire to be gazed at might explain the explosion of blogging and the staggering popularity of social-networking sites. (“Does the world really need another blog?” I have asked rhetorically in my classes, railing against the self-absorption of this generation of students.) This desire might be a wish to be in the shoes of the celebrity, the actor who preens on the big screen or whose bright smile in glossy magazine photos stirs a deep-seated envy in us who are doomed to be less-than-glamorous. Perhaps parading ourselves on the Internet strokes this envy and allows us to feel, even in a small way, that we, too, can be celebrities.

Along with this desire comes its complement: the desire to gaze, to ogle, to observe behind the scrim of anonymity. And what tool empowers the gazer quite like the Internet? The Age of the Internet has spawned the Age of The Gaze, a time in which the one who is gazed at and the one who gazes are brought together — or rather, brought together more closely — in an uneasy, sometimes testy, alliance.

As we allow ourselves to gaze unflinchingly at others, perhaps we ought to be alert to the opposite notion — of being looked at — and not be too surprised that it actually happens. In the Age of The Gaze we are both anonymous observer and blithe object. As we gaze at others, we often forget that we are being gazed at, too.

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