Webupon

Other writers will be aware that, from time to time, stories and articles one has written appear elsewhere on the internet – sometimes with permission and sometimes without. To keep track of what was published, I set up a Google Alert which, every day, tells me some of the times my name newly appears. Of course, there is also an element of egoism in doing this.

Of course, since I have quite a common name, most of the times that it appears it is referring to someone else, very commonly that John Walsh who leads America’s Most Wanted – once, in Abu Dhabi, while waiting for my daughter who was attending a dental appointment, I picked up a magazine and opened it to find a double-page headline ‘Terrorists Threaten John Walsh,’ which was momentarily alarming. It is because of having a common name that I have always supported the use of numbers rather than names. My undergraduate degree is in English Language and Literature and at one stage we were studying Zamyatin’s We; all other students thought that using a number instead of a name was dehumanizing and totalitarian while I alone thought it liberated the individual because it would give me a name not shared by anyone else.

There are other well-known John Walshes – one writes regularly for The Independent, for example, and another has a bagpipe operation. I have also found executives of companies who flare briefly in the media spotlight and then fade away. A more long-term friend has been the John Walsh who is the Sheriff of Butte, a place I have never been and would perhaps have difficulty locating on a map – alas, my acquaintance with the Sheriff is based on crime and I tend to hear about him only when something unpleasant has happened in or around Butte (it seems to have been quiet for the last few days). Crime, given the nature of the popular media, has in fact become a constant companion: at least two of my namesakes have been brutally murdered over the past year and I believe another was convicted of horrendous crimes. Less startlingly, there is another Walsh who writes articles from a pro-Christian viewpoint, another whose blog and indeed self is located in North Dorchester, MA and any number of Irish Gaelic football players and athletes.

What, if anything, does all of this mean? Well, it is certainly a reminder of the breadth of human experience and, simultaneously, a reminder of how focused we are on the same elements of life (survival, career, self-expression: maybe Maslowe had it right after all). It also indicates the ubiquity of this technology and the possibility of the globalization of knowledge. Above all, it shows the spread of alienation reintegrated through technology – Walsh (and its variants) means ‘foreigner’ (i.e. a Welsh migrant to Ireland) and so, wherever we go, we are foreigners who are connected tenuously with other foreigners.