A few weeks ago, BBC News covered a story about a Belgian teenager who is livid about 56 tiny star-shaped tattoos on her face (from afar, she appears permanently broken out).  Kimberley claims she had asked the tattoo artist for three stars near her eye—not the constellation of ink covering half of her face that she ended up with. According to her account, she fell asleep during the procedure and only woke up due to pain on her nose, which happened to be just as the artist was finishing up.

The tattoo artist told a slightly different story to the press. Kimberley, he said, had been awake from beginning to end. She had agreed to the procedure the whole way through. The first he learned of her dissatisfaction was after she’d paid and left.

Many tattoo parlors won’t even consider facial tattoos. A tattoo on a face is quite different from one anywhere else: it might one day prevent someone from getting a job. And even if it’s what it’s supposed to be—not quite a lot more than was intended—it will draw attention. There is nothing more public, when you’re in public, than your face.

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My mom is the self-proclaimed Queen of Google. A long-time AOL user who still prefers the internet within the retro-pale teal confines of America Online, she has somehow managed to perfect her use of keyword searches.  Her ability to find people with the most common of names from within the great internet sea of red herring hits is a source of pride. 

“Find my boyfriend,” I challenged her a few weeks ago on the phone.  His last name is Jones.   “OK, OK, give me a second…” and she was off. Soon she’d pulled up a student film Mr. Jones had worked on in film school.

“Send me the link!” I said. “I haven’t seen that one.”

“I’m good,” she said, “Tell me I’m good.”

I’m really not quite sure what her trick is: people with common names are hard to find via Google. Maybe Anne Smith of Columbia, Maryland gets frustrated at Anne Smith from New Jersey when the latter’s Linkedin profile appears as the top hit for “Anne Smith.” Google envy is not becoming, though—we don’t talk about this so much—because admitting to Googling yourself is still kind is gauche, even if less so than it used to be and delectably tantalizing. Still, getting buried in data—other peoples’ data!—can’t be much fun. 

I, however, am the one and only “Alexandra Heifetz” on Google. Everything I do, everything I write, every job I’ve had—every time I’m mentioned on the internet—is something a future employer, a new acquaintance, a long-lost classmate, can see. There’s no one else to hide behind. Unlike Anne Smith, clothed by the highs and lows of other Anne Smiths, my face is bared on the internet.

And there’s even a Google tattoo on it—one public to the public and hardly one I would have intended to have.  The top Google hit for “Alexandra Heifetz” is something I spent, actually, months trying to hide—and its continuous presence as the top search result is something that still bothers me. 

In 2006, an eminent philosopher wrote an essay in response to one that I had written. His essay claimed, somewhat ad hominem, that I had an inadequate “brains to bile” ratio, that my stupidity had no right to be published and that I was an embarrassment not only to the magazine I was writing for, but also to the philosophy department I graduated from.

I was 23. I had written a review of a book by Alain Badiou for a magazine website; my argument, in part, had been a critique of contemporary philosophical academia. The actual review is now long buried beneath the philosopher’s toothed critique of it: his attack received far more hits than what he had been aiming to take down (me). The top results have stayed static, notwithstanding my best efforts, for three years now.  Until the day I write a book, or for the New York Times, my Google search—my public face on the internet to all and a sundry—is tattooed with an essay that questions my very ability to think and write.

 I don’t presume that every Google user now associates me with the insults hurled my way—that would assume that a majority of Google users were searching for “Alexandra Heifetz,” which they’re not.  But to be notably public, a thing need not be seen, simply available, and, like an ursa minor splattered like zits across someone’s face, somehow out of the ordinary.  I remember, now, my uniqueness.  So does Google.  So do the few, whoever they might be, who end up searching for my name.

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Google recently announced the launch of a new feature, Google Profiles. GP would give users some amount of control over what information appears about them on searches for their names.   That is, it would allow users to create a profile that would be listed along with search results tagged to the user’s name.  The profile wouldn’t be listed at the top of the search results, but at the least, at the bottom of the first page. This doesn’t remove or displace, even, any other part of your Google face, but it does provide some amount of competition. 

In Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This, published this month, Wasik argues that, in a culture of “so-called consumer generated media,”

You become aware of yourself as a character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning. You develop, that is, the media mind. You know exactly what you are doing.

Wasik’s “You” reference is to Time’s decision in 2006 to make “You” person of the year—the “bloggers, mashup artists, YouTube videographers, political ‘hactivists’ among us.” Gone are the days, says Wasik, that people put things up on the internet for their friends only. But the “You” that’s aware of the internet world as stage is only nominally in control of your own public image, and the truth is, sometimes, blogging and posting doesn’t compete with the record saved forever on the internet.

And, in a strange way, this has made us all, each little unimportant one of us, somehow more public.  My face on the NYC streets is available to everybody, but no one looks—because it’s just another face, because I don’t have strange facial tattoos, and because no one has reference to it.  Paris Hilton’s face, on the NYC streets, is public, and people do look—because they have this reference to it as part of the celebrity feedback loop.  That is, they affect Paris Hilton by paying attention to her, and she affects them, and so forth.

But with Google, our faces—our personas—are part of a feedback loop.  A stranger can see all of the backstory to our face, and can even add to it whether we like it or not, just like a blurb in US Weekly changes the way people in NYC look at Paris Hilton. 

So Google Profiles, in this schema, is kind of like having a PR representative.  When Rihanna walks around after a domestic spat with C Brown, she’s got a shiner, and this is part of her public face—it has reference, and people can track its creation, and so forth.  Whatever her publicist says, it’s not going to remove the black eye.  But sometimes You have no choice but to try to compete. 

—Alexandra Heifetz