More than 20 years ago, my computer science tutor – bless him – gave his students a warning: “If you post something to the internet, be careful what you say. It may be around for a lot longer than you think.” Armed with this wisdom, I proceeded to go out and make a fool of myself at every possible opportunity, debating experts in their fields with the kind of confidence that only comes from complete ignorance coupled with youth. Some of these exchanges survive, archived by the mighty Google. Most – thankfully – do not. If companies had even heard of the internet in the early 1990s it’s doubtful I would have been hired by anyone. But they didn’t, so I was.

Facebook should come with an equivalent warning today. Posting to USENet in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s required enough technical nous that it was almost a given that users would know that their posts were going on to an uncensored, distributed worldwide network. The medium and the message were intertwined. Facebook has no such barrier to entry. It’s trivial to embarrass yourself – you only need a web browser – but at least that information is restricted to your friends, right?