Name hygiene - tips to guard against name shame

  We are all born with a clean slate, and it's our life challenge to get our name praised rather than spit out with distaste. 

  Chances are your name will never induce reverence like Terry Fox, or inspire loathing like Valeri Fabrikant but nonetheless we all seek the same thing, to be honoured and respected and one's name on the internet is a  huge key to that puzzle. 

  The struggle to keep our names in shape has become more difficult at a rate proportionally inverse to the explosion of information.  

   We are now all one misjudgment from having our legacy on earth irreversibly tarnished and turned to mud. Commit one controversial act (witnessed and reported)  and your reputation will descend from the top of PVM to the bottom of the Miron quarry, to say nothing of your family members who might tarred by the same brush.

   Yes you are at all times one apprehended-slip away from morphing from delightful Pee Wee Herman to weird sex criminal Pee Wee Herman.

   I mention this because this site is involved in the relatively-new practice of writing history in a way that can be read by anybody on the planet easily and for free, so people's past indiscretions mentioned here are often brought back to light.
   Until recently, it was far easier to conceal one's past misdeeds. The onus was on the other person to conduct research, hire a private investigator or rifle through court documents just to get a read on you. It was easier to simply give the other person the benefit of the doubt.    

   But old newspapers -- whose fate was initially to deteriorate in dumps -- have been given eternal life through the internet. Court documents that once required a massive effort to sift through are now a couple of clicks away.
  To think that a few years ago if you were convicted of a crime, you just disappeared into jail for a while and nobody might ever know of it, but news of your incarceration can easily spill onto the internet diminishing your reputation as well as your hopes, dreams, and trust people have in you. 

   The fear of such public shame is undoubtedly powerful and might even be a significant contributing factor in the decrease in crime. 

   Now keeping your name healthy isn't just an issue for deviants, criminals and politicians, it's a big deal for everybody, yourself included. 

   Take a situation that almost anybody might get into: let's say your roommate claims he paid the rent and you find out that he just spent it all on other things. You get evicted and your shamed name will be easily found on anybody who looks it up the on-line court-decision data base. 

   But even if you're righteous, it can still backfire. Take a situation where you are forced to take your landlord to the rental board for some issue for which he is entirely to blame: your name will be in that same databank. The next time you want to rent an apartment, the prospective landlord will see that you sued the previous landlord and will likely choose a different candidate. 

   It’s not 1988 anymore, name hygiene now requires considerable management and upkeep.

   Along with preventing name-tarring missteps, a shoplifting conviction, or getting caught in a brothel, you could do a variety of things to increase the prestige your name evokes. You could write up a wikipedia page on yourself, maintain a thoughtful blog, or participate in a charity which publishes names of participants.

    And negative mentions aren't always forever, the biographical shrapnel of your information might not take infinite flight.
   Online publications will occasionally remove negative information about you if you ask nicely. Google is reportedly not going to scan any more newspapers to put online. Some publications go belly-up and are either no longer on line or quite hard to find now, such as the Montreal Mirror. 

   And many newspapers keep their databanks exclusive, for example the Gazette's contents are password protected after 1985, so unless you find a way in, such as through a library, it's hard to find out what was written about a lot of people in newspapers. 

  And ironically, the information explosion is discouraging new reporting. There's suddenly much less money in journalism, so intrepid investigative journalists are largely things of the past. 

  As a last resort, if your name is too badly damaged for reputation management, you could change it, although that might make you seem sketchy at your high school reunion. This province publishes name changes in the Official Gazette, but it's not free on-line, so there's a good chance nobody will connect you to your old name.