Where's My Googlegänger?

A Google search of "Stephanie Rosenbloom" produced no Googlegängers (people with the same name) through 10 pages of hits. Stephanie Rosenbloom may become the Camille Paglia of the Millennium Generation.

Entering "Neil Sapper" in the Google search window produced no Googlegängers, but there is a "Neal Sapper" (finally!) out there.

[x NewWorldnJazz.com]
Neal Sapper, President of New World 'n' Jazz
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California
Inspirations: Neal has always had a passion for music. He was first exposed to the business side of music when he started working for National Record Mart at the age of 14. Later, while pursuing graduate work in clinical psychology, he learned how valuable interpersonal relationship skills are for the success of a business. His decision to create New World 'n' Jazz allowed him to merge his passion for music with the people skills he had gained through his education and work in psychology. Neal's hard work has made New World 'n' Jazz extremely successful, and has caused him to receive the prestigious Gavin Award for the Jazz and Smooth Jazz Independent Promotion Person of the Year in 1995, 1996, 2000, & 2001. This is the industry's highest honor for independent promotion. In June of 2002, Neal delivered the Keynote Address at the first annual JazzWeek Summit in Rochester NY.

Professional experience: Consulting Business, 1978-1986; Vice President of Promotions for Global Pacific Records from 1986 - 1992; President of New World 'n' Jazz from 1992 - present.

Good for Neal. He sounds like a cool dude. If this is (fair & balanced) failure to connect, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet
By Stephanie Rosenbloom

From time to time Sam Blackman, a pediatric oncologist in Philadelphia, checks up on people other than patients. Namely, other Sam Blackmans.

No stethoscope is needed to take the pulse of his namesakes, though — just a Google search. And while he has never met the men he refers to as Sam 2.0 and Sam 3.0, when one of those other Sam Blackmans posted a photograph of his wife on the Internet, Dr. Blackman, 39, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pleasure.

“I’m like ‘Oh! Sam Blackman got married,’ ” he said. “I felt like I should send a card or check his registry on Amazon.”

Now that the telephone book has been all but replaced by the minutiae-rich Web, searching out, even stalking, the people who share one’s name has become a common pastime. Bloggers muse about their multiple digital selves, known as Google twins or Googlegängers (a term that was the American Dialect Society’s “most creative” word last year).

In “Finding Angela Shelton,” a book published this month, a writer named Angela Shelton describes her meetings with 40 other Angela Sheltons. Keri Smith, an illustrator, has posted drawings of six of her Googlegängers on her blog. There are name-tally Web sites like SameNameAsMe, and Facebook coalitions including nearly 200 people named Ritz (their insignia is a cracker box logo) and a group aiming to break a world record by gathering together more than 1,224 Mohammed Hassans.

But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?

Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.

A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with B were more likely to contribute to George Bush, while those whose surnames began with G were more likely to contribute to Al Gore.

“It’s what we call implicit egotism,” Dr. Pelham, who is now a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization, said. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.”

Jason Rodriguez, 30, an editor of comic and graphic novels in Arlington, Va., feels connected to another Jason Rodriguez, a stuntman who has worked on films (some inspired by graphic novels) including sequels to “Spider-Man” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“He’s a really good stuntman,” Mr. Rodriguez said with a hint of pride. He likens himself and the stuntman — whom he has never met — to the physically incongruous brothers in the comedy “Twins” played by Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“We both sort of have this connection,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who casts himself in the Danny DeVito role. “We both support this nerd world.”

A photo editor named Tim Connor, who saw a photograph of another man with his name, wrote on his blog that the image “made him intensely real to me. I felt in some way I already knew him.”

Mr. Connor’s Googlegänger also provoked comparison and self-reflection. “I don’t feel the usual mixture of rage & shame knowing that my father would have understood and been comfortable with my Googlegänger’s career,” Mr. Connor wrote on Timconnor.blogspot.com, “and he never was with mine.”

In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen.

A feeling of connection between people with the same name is, in a way, little more than sharing an affinity for a brand — like two car owners who give each other friendly toots because they both drive Mini Coopers.

“Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges,” like buying something from them or voting for them.

Social psychologists have found that people are more attracted to others with similar faces or identical birth dates. James Bruning, a trustee professor of psychology at Ohio University, said that people’s fascination with their Googlegängers might be an adult expression of the common childhood wish to be an identical twin.

There are more prosaic reasons that people may feel connected to their Googlegängers, though. They may share a name because they belong to the same ethnic group, or their families may have had similar aspirations for them. “There’s a lot of soft evidence out there that parents largely give names based on a set of expectations,” Dr. Bruning said. “Parents who name a boy Bronco versus naming the child Cecil, you would expect one would be more likely to get a football on his next birthday and the other would get a book. That might be a starting point for one’s identity being associated with a name.”

Skeptics of the name-letter effect question how strong the affinity really is between a person’s name and his or her destiny. “I’m willing to believe that such patterns exist,” said Stanton Wortham, a professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “But I’m not willing to grant that those sorts of patterns are going to explain or drive a substantial amount of behavior.”

“Even Georgia who moved to Georgia,” he added, “she moved to Georgia for other reasons too.”

For each of the studies Dr. Pelham and colleagues conducted showing a connection between names and behavior, they compared their results with random chance. The number of Virginias who move to Virginia, for example, is 36 percent higher than could be expected by chance.

Of the 40 Angela Sheltons that Ms. Shelton, the writer, met with in researching her book, many of them were nurses. Only one voted for George W. Bush. Seventy percent, she said, reported they had been raped, sexually assaulted or abused. (Ms. Shelton’s book, subtitled “The True Story of One Woman’s Triumph Over Sexual Abuse,” was based on a documentary she made in 2001.)

“I’ve always wanted to be more empowered,” Ms. Shelton said. “And searching for my name made me grow into my name. It introduced me to myself.”

In addition to such feelings, there is also plenty of sibling, er, cyber, rivalry. People are increasingly aware of how to manage their identity online. As Jon Lee, a student and a Web developer who wants to be the first Jon Lee to turn up in a Google search, explained on his blog, “I have to top a recruitment firm, a washed-up pop star, a dead drummer and an I.B.M. guy.”

Maureen Johnson, a writer of young adult fiction in New York, acknowledges on her Web site several Googlegängers, including a self-taught marine biologist known to some as “the Crab Lady of Cape Cod.” But for a while Ms. Johnson was “very annoyed” that another Googlegänger, a real estate agent, owned the domain name MaureenJohnson. Now, however, she’s just exasperated by the stream of “Rentheads” who send e-mail messages asking if she has anything to do with Maureen Johnson, the provocative performance artist character in the musical “Rent.” Children wonder if in fact she is the “Rent” character.

“This is the bane of my existence,” said Ms. Johnson, the non-fiction version. “ ‘Are you a performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist who lives on 11th Street?’ ”

“On principle,” she said of the Tony-award-winning show, “I won’t go and see it.”

[Stephanie Rosenbloom writes for the New York Times Fashion-Style section(s). Several blogs refer to the Colgate ('97) grad as the "Queen of Trends."]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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