Your life is “on the record”

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “on the record“?  I think of something being recorded: a statement, an event, a quote or in my business, a deposition.  Someone goes “on the record” when they make a statement about an issue that is intended to last.

Social media (including blogging) turns the idea of being “on the record” on its head.  In previous times, a person’s comments might be caught on a camera or put on paper to be saved for years.  The ubiquity and ease of today’s social media services allow people to go “on the record” minute by minute.  Your tweets, Facebook posts and blog posts are captures for . . . eternity?  If not eternity, for a very a long time and the “record” is generally accesible to anyone who has Internet access.

Before people went “on the record” in the courtroom or newsroom, today people do it in the bedroom, boardroom and everywhere else.

Do ever have pause before posting something because you know the world may see it?

Posted by Shawn Roberts

On this blog, I write about and try to answer practical Oklahoma legal questions. My focus and most experience is in estate planning and business issues including Oklahoma non-compete law. I make a living as an attorney in the law firm I founded, Shawn J. Roberts, P.C. in Oklahoma City. I live in Edmond with my wife Amy and my two children, Sam (19) and David (11). We live precisely in the path of where the "wind comes sweeping down the plains."