In this day and age, it is quite common to google a name when you want to know who somebody is. Thus a few months ago, I googled our language assistant’s name and found lots of information about him before meeting him in real life.
Similarly people use the Internet to find old friends and acquaintance and have reconnected with folks they though they’d never hear of again.
I have been there too and have found former classmates, college friends and foreign colleagues. Some have become Facebook friends and it is lovely to read their updates every now and again and exchange news via private messages.
However there are also people who seem to have completely disappeared from this planet and whose name never crops up when googled – or rather when information crops up it points to a totally different person.
This is something that really puzzles me. I try to protect my data as much as I can but if you google my name, you’ll still find a few things about me. Yet there are people my age with a college degree who have no Facebook account, no visible professional email addresses which include their names, whose name is not registered in any way for their jobs; in other words people who have no Internet visibility whatsoever. Am I the only one who finds it strange not to say worrying?
Hannah's Nook 
Doesn’t really bother me. And I’d consider myself to be from the internet generation. Just googled myself. A lot of the stuff that comes up for me isn’t me and a lot of the stuff that is me is stuff I put up about myself – Facebook and translation stuff. A lot of people don’t have stuff about themselves online.
I still believe that if you have a job that involves writing and where you spend time on a computer you are bound to have some Internet visibility.
I guess it’s worrying if you wonder if the person is OK. If they had a difficult time when you knew them, you may be right that life is even more difficult now.
I don’t think I can pinpoint the type of worries I have; it’s just a feeling.
At today’s Yom Haazmaut barbecue it was amazing how many of the people there actually aren’t on FB, or on social media at all. In fact, my husband’s one of them – unless you google a combination of both his name and field you come up with pages and pages of strangers. For those of us who spent so much time online it seems unfathomable, but it appears there still are those who would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the social media age.
There are three people I’d like to find: one is (was) a teacher and the other one worked in books that’s why it bothers me not to see their names. As for the third one, I have just found her sister (on LinkedIn) and now have her email address.
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I know a few who are seemingly anonymous online. It is weird, but not that unusual.