I got into this whole programming thing because of the super optimistic feeling about the internet that chases down anyone who ends up working in this field: the fact that theoretically, you will make something that is instantly accessible to any person on the globe; you can make a website that allows anyone to read anything you want them to. It goes straight to the head, and then you get all into the idea that you can make an amazing website for people.

Either way, the problem comes in when you hook in something like google analytics into a website. Every night, I find myself waiting for the results of the last day to come in. At first, I was just interested in how many people ended up using the website I made, but nowadays, I’ve been getting into the dirty business of looking at the various data porn minutiae that is included in the daily reports. How much time did people spend on fancy fruit yesterday? How many Europeans visited geoffpigman.com? I get so into this world that I feel like its starting to be an issue. And then, tonight, I was looking at the reports for this site, and I saw all the google terms that were used to get to the site. Some were exciting, like “flash sound mixer” and “it projects resume” or “ruby and rails more:body_search”, but then there were a few creepy ones that I got to see, like “devin gaffney or” or “devin cms.” That means that, well, I guess, someone is looking for me? Kind of the first time that I was looking at data and really physically having a reaction to how weird this all is. I mean, you have a right to do whatever you want to do on the internet; I guess the scary part is that we all know about it.

I was talking to my cousin last week about how the next generation of politicians will have to be excused as fallible; facebook and myspace and all these other social media services have, as my friend Mark Mahoney tweeted, “ma[de] it impossible to escape the shame of my high school years.” This, feel like, is going to come to a very violent head in the next decade or so when we all realize how screwed up it is that google knows all about where we are, what we’ve done, where we’ve been, and all of this. I feel like its going to be interesting to see what happens to all of us when we lose our privacy permanently; what we learn, or what we gain, when its a thought, when its an idea, or something immaterial, it can’t be unthought, and we’re going to have to learn to just be cool with the fact that people might creepily look us up.