Yesterday, David Letterman revealed on-air that he was the victim of an extortion plot by a former CBS News employee who was threatening to reveal some rather embarrassing details about him by publishing them in a screenplay unless he paid 2 million dollars. Apparently, Letterman had affairs with female employees on his show and this guy thought he could extort some money from him. Letterman did the right thing by taking things to the authorities. They arrested dirtbag Robert J. “Joe” Halderman on Friday and put him behind bars where he belongs. Here’s what’s interesting, rather than keeping things under wraps after the guys plot was foiled, Letterman decided to confess his wrongdoings on national television!

There are some serious implications to having office affairs, but even more so with your subordinates. I’m not going to go into that. What I want to focus on is transparency. When Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinski in the 90s, no one was able to capitalize on the scandal better than Letterman, who was still  making jokes about the affair in 2001. Maybe Letterman learned form Clinton’s mistakes, but I think his decision to come clean even after the blackmailer was arrested really comes as a result of the type of world we live in NOW.  Whereas Clinton felt that he could lie about his affair and keep his wrongdoings secret, Letterman (and Mark Sanford) realized that access to information and dissemination via social media like blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks make the spread of this information almost inevitable and difficult to cover up, so coming clean was probably the best choice. When people said “honesty is the best policy”, they were just lying. However, transparency is making this a reality. Access to information is making it difficult to lie.

Jenny Merkin with the Atlantic  wrote a story entitled “How Facebook Will Change Our Scandals”. She argues that Facebook (she uses it to symbolize Social Media) will make scandals more common while also making them less damaging. “Scandals will still exist, but popular reaction could ease. As with monetary inflation — the more money out there, the lower the value of the dollar — we could experience scandal inflation. With so much private information sloshing around the net,  scandals could lose their luster.”

Social media is still a fairly new phenomena and we are just now beginning to see its power to do positive things and destroy lives. For the most part, I agree with Jenny’s conclusion. Really though, what I think is happening is the veil that existed between our public and private lives is becoming more transparent.  Social media is changing our lives, not just online, but in “real life”. People are realizing that their online profile is only an extension of themselves and, as an old quote says, “character is who you are when no one is watching.” To put it bluntly, if pictures of you doing things you’d be ashamed of are showing up online, then there is a misalignment between who you try to portray and who you really are.

As peer review, video, cell phone cameras, and even satellite photography become more widespread, we are sure to be more careful about what we do or say in public (Orwell’s 1984 is here). Just as with anything new we don’t understand quite fully, we are bound to make mistakes when learning how to use it. It may take some failures to get us to change our way of doing things and, in social media, I trust there will be some social casualties. Some have already learned lessons like, don’t post pictures of yourself up on Facebook getting wasted with friends,  don’t make inappropriate comments on a photograph if you wouldn’t want them broadcast over the internet, and don’t lie about something you know can be Googled. Who knows, maybe we’ll get smart and instead of creating scandals for ourselves, we’ll make sure that our behavior in private reflects what we say we represent. Or maybe Jenny Merkin is right, scandals will become so rampant that we’ll just lower the standards and say…”Ah, WTF does it matter anyway?”