Lawyers and Facebook

I do not personally know any lawyers. I have heard that many law firms do not want any of their members (lawyers who work for the firm) to participate in social media online. Apparently this means being in youtube videos either. These lawyers cannot let themselves be pictured on other’s web sites without getting in trouble.

The potential damage of getting caught with a drink in their  hand or an arm around the wrong person is so great that the people who do battle on the battlefield of law cannot allow themselves to join in to the surveillance revolution.

This tells me something very important to know about lawyers. They are more worried about perception than reality. It is not the reality of your situation, but the perception of the situation, by a jury, that get you thrown in prison or not. Basically, it boils down to what specific people think about the situation.

Perhaps there will come a day, soon hopefully, where things that happen on social media are left on social media. People have to live their lives. They are not in a bubble. The only thing that has changed is the amount of scrutiny.

Lawyers and politicians, because they are mostly lawyers, have one rule. Control the narrative, control the situation. Or, the one who controls the story controls the outcome. They call it driving or steering the narrative. It is done by controlling what people think by controlling what people are told or what evidence is available.

Lawyers would say “I lost the narrative” instead of “I got caught lying”..

The same argument was once made about the burden of literacy. The more that people know the harder they are to control. The last thing you want to teach  people is they don’t need you to survive. This is the same regardless of whether you want them to stay under your control or not.