NET RESULTS:E-mails, social network sites and discussion boards can often lead to moments of acute embarrassment, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

WE ALL have the occasional private conversation, never intending the contents to be widely overheard.

But life is messy. There can be few so saintlike (or lucky) that at some point, they don’t experience that toe curling, cringe-making moment of realisation that what was just said, was overheard by the person being discussed. You know: the second when all you can think is, please oh please oh please, let the earth split asunder and swallow me up.

Thanks to modern technology, and especially the internet, we can all enjoy the increased possibility of this particularly excruciating form of embarrassment. And, due to the inventiveness of the boffins, that opportunity is supplied in endlessly new formats.

Take e-mail. Who among us has not hit “reply all” on a group e-mail when you wished only to pass a snide comment back to the original sender about some idiot on the list? Or accidentally had a very personal e-mail intended for one person go to a mailing list group because you forgot the e-mail you are responding to was a list e-mail, not a personal e-mail?

The innocent-seeming reply button has a lot to answer for. And let that sterling individual be praised who has never, ever forwarded a message, forgetting that the forwarded dialogue includes a less than kind personal comment or observation about the individual to whom you have forwarded the e-mail. Or sensitive details that should not have been further dispersed.

Not that I always complain about the latter situation. Many a journalist has done well out of a forwarded e-mail where the sender thought they were only sending on a snippet of information at the very top of the e-mail, and accidentally included what should have remained a private conversation about business matters. Then there is the nightmare of auto-complete, where you mean to type in one name in the recipient box, but the form-fill function on your computer adds a different, similar, name, and you fail to notice it and hit send.

Though again, there can be a silver lining. I once was copied in accidentally on a conversation between a public relations agency and a client on the cost and strategy of a campaign. I always wondered whether the client ever noticed that this rather sensitive (but extremely interesting) conversation was cc’d to The Irish Times. Not, you understand, that I am overly gleeful about such occurrences.

I’ve been there and done that on all of these e-mail faux pas. And pretty much just wanted to die immediately afterwards. Frustratingly, there really is very little you can say when you have just made a blunt statement about somebody that was not meant for their eyes – and they see it. Take it from me, elaborate and inventive, but always highly unlikely excuses really only make the situation worse.

But what a fresh hell is offered by the new online world of social media technologies. It is embarrassingly easy to send a tweet which is then impossible to retract. Yes, yes, you can delete if you go to your Twitter home page. But unless you have no followers at all (you sad creature!), your 140 character or less indiscretion will have been read and very possibly re-tweeted – forwarded – to who knows how many others.

Or take Facebook comments. Maybe you post a comment on somebody’s Facebook page, think better of it, and delete it. But alas, most people have their Facebook pages set up to e-mail them all new comments. And everyone else who posted a comment on the same thread also has probably taken the default position of receiving all additional comments as e-mails. So that little quip you made, then thought better of, will have been read by the person (and likely many others) anyway.

As if all this weren’t enough to make one go back to a computer- and social media-free life, I stumbled across the ultimate mortification this week. The latest update release of the vBulletin discussion board software that I use for my own board apparently has a little glitch that enables anyone to see a listing of the most recent posts made to the formerly invisible, private forums on the board.

This board software, like most, enables the administrator to set up private forums that are invisible to all except whoever the administrator gives viewing privileges. Often you set up a private forum for the board’s moderators for discussing administrative issues.

The conversation topics would be similar to what would be said in the teachers’ room at a school, or the staff canteen of the company – a place where people blow off steam or voice frustrations that aren’t intended for general consumption.

To discover that your private forum posts have been public to the entire board-reading community: the horror, the horror! All I can say is, for once, I celebrated my own laziness – the one thing that kept me from having installed that particular board update.

klillington@irishtimes.com

Blog: Techno-culture.com

Twitter: _at_klillington