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The wordtoys.net user profile for "Tim" is constructed solely via googlism.com, a site that searches for and produces lists of descriptive items under the parameter "X is"--in this case, "tim is…." I simply plugged "tim" into the search bar, selected the radio button "Who" to define the search results to relate to people, and then culled the following page for interesting/relevant/eye-catching googlisms that I could organize by gradually decreasing length until the final short line, "tim is." Why did I do this? To underscore the instability of online authenticity.

Depending on a site's purpose, user profiles range from ostensibly standing in for physical (non-virtual) reality (e.g., Facebook) to representations of exclusively online personae (e.g., Digg); however, the fictional manipulability of profiles is more or less limitless, and a page summarizing a user's non-virtual persona (interests, educational info, etc.) may be far less "authentic" (in the sense of adherence to factual data) than a page that bears no obligation or expectation of authenticity. In other words, online reality makes lying easy, often to heinous ends (as MSNBC's *To Catch a Predator* sadly exhibits). In my case, "Tim" is not me; "Tim," the user display name, is also not "tim," the googlism-generated subject of the user profile; nor is "tim" "tim," as each descriptive clause derives from a different source.

To touch on how this relates to our general concerns, the question of virtual authenticity hits head on the question of virtual authorship. Who is the "author" of my profile? Can an online persona be a separate author from a human being? Copyright can become a tricky issue, as well: "publication" of an original work only has to involve uploading or typing text to a webpage, leaving it vulnerable to unauthorized usage or even republication by someone else. Is the latter case legally considered plagiarism, since the original publication cannot be attributed to an individual by copyright? And collaboration: did I collaborate with googlism to create Tim's profile? Did I collaborate with the other sites' creators, even though googlism's lack of transparency disallows me from knowing their sources? Did I collaborate with Tim to create tim?