Are you paranoid about what Google is saying about you? Do you have sleepless nights fearing the very real possibility that a potential employer will chuck your name into a search engine and boot you from their shortlist after seeing unflattering photos from uni or an ill-conceived forum post from high-school? Would you like to see all of that stuff taken down? Then you know exactly how Croatian pianist Dejan Lazic feels.
In 2010, Lazic was the subject of a less than stellar review in the Washington Post. In the four-year-old review, the Post‘s Anne Midgette praised Lazic’s natural talent but criticised his performance at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater for its grandiose nature and Lazic’s “host of concert-pianist playacting gestures”.
Midgette’s remains one of the first links to appear when searching Lazic’s name in Google. Now, Lazic is demanding the Post remove the review from their site under a recent clause passed by the European Union that says individuals have a the “right to be forgotten online”.
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As the Post reports, Lazic wrote to the paper in a letter dated 30th October, in which he insisted, “To wish for such an article to be removed from the internet has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or with closing down our access to information.”
“I so often listen to a concert, and then the next day read about it in the newspapers — read something that is simply too far from the truth,” Lazic continued. “This is something I, as an artist, am seeking and looking for my whole life: the truth.”
Naturally, the Post has not acquiesced to Lazic’s demand, and not just because the EU’s ruling only pertains to search engines and only within the European Union – in other words, if Lazic wants the article removed from his Google results, he needs to take it up with Google and not the Post.
According to the Post, removing the article would set a dangerous and potentially irreversible precedent regarding the freedom afforded to culture critics, as the Post notes in an editorial responding directly to Lazic.
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“It’s a question that goes far beyond law or ethics, frankly — it’s also baldly metaphysical, a struggle with the very concept of reality and its determinants. Lazic (and to some extent, the European court) seem to believe that the individual has the power to determine what is true about himself, as mediated by the search engines that process his complaints,” writes Caitlin Dewey.
“Never mind that such an attitude torpedoes the very foundation of arts criticism, a pursuit that even Lazic says makes us ‘better off as a society’. Never mind that it essentially invalidates the primary function of journalism, which is to sift through competing, individual storylines for the one that most closely mirrors a collective reality. Or that it undermines the greatest power of the Web, as a record and a clearinghouse for our vast intellectual output.”
Worst of all for Lazic, his letter seems to have made matters worse for his reputation. Since the Post published their editorial response, Lazic’s request to the paper has gone viral and the unflattering review is now sandwiched between hundreds of new results that could be worse for his public image than the review that had him so miffed in the first place.
