SEND: Don’t Be Dumb

Please, please!

Don’t Be Dumb!

Cell phone or email or blog or Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or whatever: Beware the Send Button!

“The moment you push ‘send,’
the damage is done.”

The link will take you to the tragic story about Jessica Logan, who took a non-clothes cell photo of herself and sent it to her boyfriend. In a terrible cascade of forwards and resends, hundreds (if not thousands) of people received it. And Jessica was verbally pummeled face-to-face as well as via phone, text, email, Facebook, MySpace, and who knows what other medium.

Things like this make me mad. And sad.

Our technology allows us to do so much dumb (and worse) stuff on a whim. And regret later.

She did something very foolish in taking that photo of herself. She compounded her error by texting that photo to someone else. At that point, a character flaw or a bad attitude or a wrongly-entered recipient or a wrong key pressed or another foolish choice — and the original recipient sent it on.

And the process was repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Have you learned the lesson now?

Message to Albert and Cynthia Logan: May you find comforting grace in Jesus Christ. As a dad, father-in-law, and grandpa, my heart aches for your daughter…and for you. I’m sorry. 😥

The Meaning of Is

Here’s part of the story:

Flirting goes high-tech with racy photos shared on cellphones, Web

Passing a flirtatious note to get someone’s attention is so yesterday. These days, young people use technology instead.

About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they’ve sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be “fun or flirtatious,” a survey finds.

A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they’ve seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have.

[…]

Most of those surveyed (73%) said they knew sending sexually suggestive content “can have serious negative consequences,” yet 22% said it’s “no big deal.”

Adrift.

And so the moral decline continues.

She’s Safe!

I was glad to see this outcome:

Jubilant that she was found safe, relatives of an Oregon teenager who went missing in Brazil and set off a fevered search were left to wonder Thursday how someone they saw as responsible could have disappeared for four days without telling them her plans.

Mckensie Martin, 17, turned up in the Brazilian coastal city of Salvador on Thursday, hundreds of miles from the city where she has been an exchange student for the past few months.

Above all, love God!