It is What it Is

Welcome to 1984 (and Not in a Good, Footloose-is-Back-on-Top-of-the-Charts Kind of Way)

Sometimes I worry that I could easily become a conspiracy nut. (I realize that most people probably don’t have this on their list of concerns, but my worry list has always been longer, and stranger, than most.) I blame some of it on the fact that I spent most of my childhood watching soap operas, Phil Donahue and Unsolved Mysteries. There was even a brief – and unfortunate – period when I believed that Elvis faked his own death.

And despite what my occasionally rational brain tells me about accidents and coincidence, I think I’ve watched far too many political thrillers as an adult, too. (I still find it odd that one of the most liberal members of the Senate, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash shortly before some key votes under the Bush administration, but I try to keep this mostly to myself.)

However, I do not think I’m paranoid when I say that we are, at present, on the verge of living in the world created by George Orwell in 1984. But, it’s not big government we need to be afraid of -– it’s Facebook.

Even without the latest issues Facebook has had with privacy, revealing information to other web sources, etc., social networking has always had the potential to implement a kind of social control that no invading army or government entity is capable of. And the key to that societal control rests entirely in surveillance.

For an anthropology class nearly a decade ago (when I sat down on the first day and saw that half the room was full of athletes, I knew I’d found a good place to be), I read a book called Depraved and Disorderly. It’s a study of women in penal colonies in Australia (aka, the founding women of Australia), and for the large part, the book discusses how constant surveillance and the removal of all privacy was used to turn these “wild women” into the model citizens the English government wanted them to be at the time.

The Other Laurel Mills

Every so often, I google myself. (Yes, that means exactly what it sounds like -- I type my own name into Google's search engine to see what pops up.) What can I say? I find myself fascinating. Also, to discuss amongst yourselves: To what degree is an Internet presence today's gauge of how much one matters/how successful one is?

Those of you with dignity and whatnot can pretend that you never engage in such time-wasting, self-indulgent shenanigans, but I still won't believe you. I think, apart from noticing the occasional celebrity or world news event, most of us find ourselves to be our own favorite subject. This explains the number of mirrors in most homes, the joys of scrap booking and the prevalence of ancestry as a hobby. (Feel free to discuss this last concept amongst yourselves as well.)

Unfortunately for my often-flailing self-esteem, it takes many pages of "laurel mills" Google search results to find the Laurel Mills penning this blog post. There is a town in Virginia called Laurel Mills (a place I think I should be official queen of, but that's another story for another day) mills in Laurel, Mississippi and Laurel, Maryland as well as, perhaps worst of all, another, far more successful and acclaimed writer by the name of Laurel Mills.

Sigh.

But, it's not the other writer Laurel MIlls' bigger talent that concerns me the most about this. (I'm always willing to be mistaken for someone more successful and more talented.) It's that the other Laurel Mills is known primarily for lesbian fiction. The tags "lesbian interest" and "lesbian writing" are most commonly associated with her search results. In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, not that there's anything wrong with that, but as a single gal with mostly married friends, I need all the help I can get. And, on the off, off chance that a single, straight man picks up a copy of a magazine called Lipstick and decided to google me, I'd really rather him know that I'm straight, too.

You can find out about the other Laurel Mills (pictured), lauded poet and author of Undercurrents, here.