What happened to Carrie Prejean can happen to anyone. It isn’t just that technology connects us. Large parts of our lives occur or are posted, cataloged, reported, or otherwise archived at sites or through sources that can be accessed through the Internet. It is very easy for people to find information about us and post it publicly when they suddenly discover they have reason to care. Carrie Prejean’s “naughty” photos went unnoticed and unreleased for years before her sudden fame made them of interest. It took no real effort, no team of private detectives, for countless bloggers and media personalities alike to find every morsel of dirt they could on Carrie Prejean, attacking her incessantly through a fad-driven and relentless media cycle.

We live in the age of the viral video. An ordinary citizen can be plucked from obscurity and rocketed to instant celebrity simply because a photo or clip on the Internet was found entertaining or interesting by a few people, who forwarded it to a few other people, who linked it to still more people, who suddenly found themselves a majority. If there’s a camera phone in the room, anything interesting, shocking, controversial, or otherwise noteworthy can and will find its way to the Web and then to the screens of millions of human beings, almost at the speed of thought. Given this, anything you say can and will be used against you, at any time someone deems it offensive. Where once giving offense meant dealing with a single angry person, it now means coping with one’s instant infamy while contending with thousands or even millions of people who now have something bad to say to and about you. If we continue letting a hostile, intolerant minority dictate what is acceptable and unacceptable thought to a majority of Americans, we will have accepted technological dictatorship by default.

via A technological lynching.