Table of contents for Carrie Prejean

1. 10 Lessons From Carrie Prejean
2. Anything You Record May Come Back to Haunt You
3. Confession Is Not Enough
4. Save It For When You’re Married
5. It’s Good To Take a Stand For Marriage
6. Beauty Is Only Skin Deep
7. Delayed Reaction
8. Taking a Stand Is Costly
9. Don’t Seek the Spotlight
10. Grace, Seasoned With Salt

Carrie Prejean wasn’t the first person to make a recording she thought would remain private, only to find out that it did not.  Many people every day are making recordings, taking photographs and writing statements that they believe will only be read, seen and heard by the intended recipients.

Yet, the Internet has proven just how wrong this kind of thinking is.

Reply To All

One of the big things in our present age is the “Reply To All” problem—a nifty feature in most e-mail programs that allows you to broadcast your secrets en masse to everyone on the original e-mail.

I’ve hit “reply to all” before, and I’ve sent e-mails to wrong people.  This was a whole lot harder to do when everything was in type or written in letters.  But some have found that their personal relationships are on display to all because they hit the wrong reply.

Explicit Photographs

Ever since there has been the ability to record an image on film or paper, people have taken photos of things that they find attractive.  This also applies to people taking pictures of themselves and others.

The digital age has made this worse, by allowing images that could have been burned or destroyed to find new life on the Internet, without the ability to remove all copies.

It was one thing when a person would take a photo specifically for another, and you knew that you had the negative and every copy (though one wonders if the developer could have a copy?).  You could easily feel comfortable knowing that there were 2 copies and a negative should things go bad.

Now, something happens with your relationship and all your family and friends have that picture that you’d never want them to see.

Explicit Video

And it wasn’t long from there that people started video taping themselves doing intimate things.  For what rationale, I’m not completely sure, but what has resulted is that multiple people in the public—mostly women—have found their reputations enhanced or tarnished by these videos.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter if you’re Dr. Laura (with photos taken from a boyfriend) or Carrie Prejean (with a sex video and modeling photographs), or Paris Hilton (with a video and other sexually charged images)—you can be sure that anything recorded can come back to haunt you.

Even text, written on a blog about a viewpoint or audio spoken on the radio can be read and misread.  It’s important that we think more about our testimony and reputation than doing something “fun” or “cute” that could hurt and bring more pain than the pleasure we think it will bring.