Let's get recorded

If I'm too wasted to remember doing it, then nobody else will remember me doing it -- right? \nOn www.usatoday.com, an article by Marco R. della Cava examined the exhibitionist tendencies of college students on spring break. The write-up's description of the shenanigans that took place on Arizona's Lake Havasu that week were eerily reminiscent of Jane Goodall's journal entries. \nIU's break ended weeks ago, and the most potentially humiliating thing I could have been caught doing then was dancing to a "Blue's Clues" video with my 3-year-old niece. So with an air of self-righteousness, I snickered at the intoxicated revelers, whose compromising positions were captured on film and posted for the Web-surfing world to see.\nBut after thinking about it a little more, I realized that spring break isn't the only time to get caught on film under incriminating circumstances. The walls of my apartment are smothered in snapshots of my drunken escapades: wrestling in barbecue sauce with a homeless Chicago rapper; careening down a Slip 'n' Slide in a white wife-beater rendered translucent by water; toweling off my face after failing an attempt to toss a butter shot into my mouth from a glass nestled in my cleavage.\nAnd these are just the pictures my friends have taken! Who knows how many strangers lurk out there with photographic documentation of my youthful indiscretions?\nPeople have been setting themselves up for photo blackmail for ages; my Web search produced racy erotica from as early as the 19th century. But back then, the expense of processing and the unreliable postal system helped to keep photos from falling into the wrong hands.\nNowadays, renderings of Dionysian debauchery are practically guaranteed to do just that. Thanks to digital photography, cell phone snappers are always on hand to capture that Kodak moment. Before you know it, your triumphant victory is popping up on your Uncle Lester's Google search for wet T-shirt contests. Was it worth that strand of plastic beads?\nWe are a nation of attention whores and nosy voyeurs, as evidenced by the slew of fly-on-the-wall reality TV shows and scads of deeply confessional blog sites on the Internet. As della Cava puts it, today's youth "have a consumer-driven view of media, where iPods make anyone a disc jockey and camcorders do the same for aspiring directors. Why wait for reality TV to discover you when you can bring the world a bit of your own reality?"\nWell, future regret might be one reason to hold off. What happens when you go for an interview with a potential employer afflicted with the same Google addiction as Uncle Lester? Things that seem like a good idea while intoxicated, like having your friends photograph you mooning a nursing home, generally tend to appear less intelligent after sobering up ... especially if the pictures happen to be strewn all over your coffee table when the cops show up to question your involvement.\nSo what exactly am I getting at? Am I telling everybody to become teetotalers to avoid entanglement in a career-killing PR snafu 20 years from now? Of course not. Not only would that be futile, but entirely hypocritical.\nInstead, I think we should all make a mutual agreement to withhold condemnation of those unlucky souls whose lapses in judgment become public domain. I pretend I didn't catch those topless Mardi Gras candids of you, and you return the favor later on when my fuchsia projectile vomit-incident pictures inevitably leak into circulation. Together, we can obliterate the stigma involved with this kind of exposure -- and then we can all get as stoopid as we want from then on!\nBesides, I could swear that's Uncle Lester guzzling tequila out of a co-ed's belly button in "Girls Gone Wild 3"