“Sam, we’re screwed!” Lara yells, running toward me. She drops her backpack on the floor and points to my laptop. “We’ve got to get off Twitter!” 

“Huh?” I take off my headphones. Everyone in the library seems to be staring at us. “What’s going on?” I ask. 

“Twitter. When you Google our names, all of our status updates come up. Our potential employers can see that!” Lara looks concerned, which makes me wonder if I should be worried too. 

“And our blogs! They can see them. Take me off your blog roll, okay?”

“O .. Okay.”

“Thanks, Sam! It’s just so scary. I don’t want to mess up my chances of getting a great job, you know? Well, I’ve got to go home,” Lara grabs her bag and heads out the door, but not before shouting, “don’t forget to take me off your blog roll!” 

I put my headphones back on and try to return to my marketing research, but I can’t focus. I open the Google home page and type in my name. Sure enough, my Twitter updates are the first results, followed by my blog, and a few random websites. I imagine Lara’s panicked face. She’s right. Potential employers will be able to see this. All of this. I should be worried. So I log onto Twitter and delete my account.

Three hours later, I’m eating dinner in my apartment while browsing the internet. I can’t help but Google myself once more. Three of the results are from pages on Saul Alinsky, the late American community and labor activist whose students include Cesar Chavez, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, and me. 

Me?

Yes. 

According to DemocratsSuck.com, Encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com, and Theabsurdreport.com, I was a student of Saul Alinsky. 

Never mind that Alinsky died 14 years before I was born.

When I was a sophomore in college, I went through a Saul Alinsky phase. I was young, living in Madison, and I found social activism appealing. As a joke, a friend edited the Wikipedia entry on Saul Alinsky, adding me to his list of students. He removed me a couple of weeks later, but it was too late. A handful of websites had already cited Wikipedia’s article, and I was permanently linked to DemocratsSuck.com 

Maybe this should make me nervous. But it doesn’t. The bottom line is, if a potential employer is naive enough to believe that I was actually a student of Saul Alinsky, I probably don’t want to work for them anyway. If they’re not willing to hire me because of my blog, or my twitter updates, then it’s their loss, right? Maybe.

Facebook, Twitter, blogs.. these are all tools that I use to represent myself. I don’t write inappropriate updates on Twitter. I use Twitter to network. And I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve written on my blog. 

This post is long, but it has a point, I promise. In kindergarten, Miss Davis told me to always be myself. I often wondered how I could be myself if I didn’t know who I really was. I’m still not sure who I am. I’m growing and changing every day. But if I stop expressing myself, stop sharing my ideas, then I stop being the person that I’ve become. 

After dinner, I logged back onto Twitter and reactivated my account.