Digital heedlessness

I like how Frank Bruni attributes a large part of the embarrassment caused to all parties in the "Petraeus affair" to our "precocious devices."

What do our "precocious devices" (where precocity means everything that's electronic, ergo speedy) do to our impulses? They allow them to fly, literally, without the advantage of reflection.

Here's an 18th century suitor in a Jane Austen novel, composing a billet doux for the object of his carefully considered affection:

[He] puts pen to paper, his pace slow, his pauses frequent and the reply — itself written in longhand — probably weeks away. 

The romance that this slow-cooked expression of love produces "had a rhythm that accommodated reconsideration. It had a built-in cooling-off period."

And today?

There sits Anthony Weiner armed with his "precocious device" (no pun intended), experiencing a momentary flaring of his libido:

Cyberspace unleashed him, goading him to boldly go where no would-be New York City mayor should. And cyberspace undid him, creating an indelible record of where he’d traveled, and in what manner of undress. In lieu of eavesdroppers whom he could have disputed, he had digital footprints that he couldn’t deny, and they traced a path not to Gracie Mansion but to political ruin.

The Petraeuses--the digital "family" of decorated army generals, government officials, voluptuous socialites, and lean, brainy female hagiographers--had their little sexy discourses on cyberspace, where there is no "true, dependable privacy" whether we are "tapping or typing" in it: 

The Petraeus drama reflects the enticements and betrayals of our new, disembodied modes of discourse. The come-ons, the flirtations, the stalking, the alleged harassment: all were abetted by the deceptive cloak of cyberspace, and all were immortalized there. It’s a story of people not just behaving badly but e-mailing badly as well.

The message: keep calm and carry on with expressing the flares in your loins, but don't do so on your "treacherous screens."