Back in the Nineties, those halcyon pre-2.0 days, I had a job teaching undergraduates. One morning, one of my charges arrived distraught. A who-had-slept-with-whom college flow chart that had previously been published on lavatory doors had suddenly appeared on the internet. The relationship over which she merited inclusion had been a painful case of first love, ended unpleasantly, and she did not want her mother – an avid follower of collegiate life – to learn about it. The dean reacted swiftly and the site was shut down.

Looking back on this narrative, one is hit by a distinct whiff of nostalgia. Was there really a time when sensibilities were so refined? A time before young people happily violated their own privacy via a glut of posted comments, salacious images, and revealing status updates, and when parents could not learn about their offspring’s misadventures via a few short clicks? An era when public outpourings could be disciplined and censorship, not least self-censorship, prevailed?

Well, yes, there was, although of late it can be difficult to recall the nuances of this culture, its reticence and evasions. Recently I ran across a twentysomething woman whose profile is an erotic stream of consciousness, its imagery composed of pictures of her breasts. Incredulous, the decade or so gulf in our ages gaping, I stuttered, “But, your entire existence, your body, your interior life is up there for the taking?” Her reply a derisive, “Duh.”

Resistance to technology invariably distinguishes one generation from another, be it 16th-century distaste for print authorship, or a 21st-century reluctance to tweet. However, my issue is less one of Luddism than of decorum. For there is now a generation of 20 and 30-year-olds who have become so used to living what might once have constituted their private lives in public – thanks to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter and the like – that they have lost any sense of the boundary between public and private.

In the past month, I have encountered a Facebook labour recounted by a couple who met via checking out friends of friends, and a status update declaration of miscarriage. A man I know has announced that he and his fiancée are no longer to marry (the first – and last – said fiancée has heard of it).

I have learnt of my colleagues’ erotic dalliances (“Tom is getting acquainted with Saturday’s hottie…”, “Tom is in lust...”, “Tom is over gurlz”) and underlying mental conditions (“Alice is back on the ’zac”). And I’m a social networking refusenik.

As Matt, a 26-year-old law student puts it, “When I was in my teens, we used to use the abbreviation ‘tmi’, that is, too much information. No one ever says this any more because we’re living in a constant state of hot and cold-running tmi. Someone I know put his STD on his status update.”

The disinhibited

The Americans have referred to this paradigm shift as the ascendency of “Generation Reveal”. The psychiatric term for it would be “disinhibition”. The disinhibited exhibit a fundamental lack of restraint in their inability to edit their responses according to norms of social convention and/or risk. Their emotions spew out of them, all capacity for the euphemisms that society operates by disabled.

As ever, the most urgent fears surrounding this generational disinhibition focus on teenagers. A day does not go by without some fresh multimedia outrage: parties advertised on Facebook run riot; shenanigans surrounding pornographic video footage; girls representing themselves in the manner of soft-porn starlets; bullying; suicide. The Utopia that was a social arena unpoliced by adults would appear to have become a dystopian reality; prompting the President of the United States, no less, to warn teens against posting material that may come to haunt them.

And yet everyone, it seems, is at it. Where one might once have confided one’s amorous intrigues in one or two intimates, so today’s mornings-after will be posted to hundreds, perhaps thousands of “friends”. Instead of asking someone to have dinner, a prospective suitor is as likely to “sext” (send an explicit image via MMS), as a foretaste of what is to follow. And lovers keep themselves and others abreast of every last detail of their relationships via social-networking-as-haiku site Twitter.

Jennifer Aniston’s erstwhile beau, John Mayer, has exhibited the most prominent case of Twitter addiction as relationship-imperilling verbal diarrhoea. When the couple were rumoured to be newly engaged, he opined, “Half of my heart is a shotgun wedding to a bride with a newspaper ring/ HOMH is the part of a man who knows he’s never really loved a thing.” On being, quite rightly, dumped for such musings, his Twitter stream noted, “This heart didn’t come with instructions.” Mayer is 31.

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