One of the recent pieces to bubble to the surface of the news media has been the Alec Baldwin tirade that was caught on voice mail and then circulated into the internet and television media. I have no personal comments on the actual phone message content, context etc. Those are private matters between family members of the Baldwin family.
However, it does have a related lesson for anyone and everyone including private and public sectors of business - its been a long standard regulatory requirement on trading desks to record all telephone calls, technologies called trading turrets provided by a number of manufacturers facilitate the logical recording of these telephone communications. And like most technologies responsible for accumulating large amounts of data, little or no thought is given to the search and retrieval of the same data - hundreds of phone calls were recorded each minute and stored and if you ever needed to get one of them back to listen to it, well, good luck, another million of so dollars and six months later you found that call.
So, back to the Alec Baldwin voice recording, its pretty amazing how times have changed and a single voice message is so easily extracted and made available across the internet with a few commands and is played on multiple media outlets around the world in minutes. The nature of communications is ferocious to say the least. And in the compliance and legal discovery world the lesson for all is that voice mail, email, and nearly all communications have a shelf life that will long out-live us and that in the touch of a few key strokes any communication medium can be replicated worldwide to millions in a matter of seconds. So, never never never communicate anything that you would not be perfectly OK being read in aloud in a public forum.
I've heard some speakers, along the same lines, infer that if you can't read it aloud in church then don't write it - I wouldn't go that far - lots of my normal business correspondence would not be appropriate for church - but thats just business. Another popular speaker I once heard used an analogy of riding in a car and that we are often misled by the sense of privacy we have in a car, although everyone is peering in through the windows, a reminder of the Jerry Seinfeld episode and the famous nose pick was the moral of his story, everyone is watching. It may be time to deliver a new form of communications, void of traceability or maybe we should just be more careful.
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