Present Tense: On YouTube during the week, you could watch a video of some teenage lads larking about in an Irish town.
Wearing their school uniforms, they posture and play-fight. At one point, one of the boys throws an empty bottle on the ground and keeps walking. To most people over 30, such littering is guaranteed to bubble up the blood pressure. But to a teenage boy, it is no big deal. He owns the planet. It's his to do what he wants with.
In the flow of a person's life, such a bottle-throwing jape/crime against humanity is forgivable. We were all teenagers once, and all did things we're not particularly proud of.
Or maybe you are proud of them, but know you shouldn't be.
Either way, we all did dumb things in our youth. But we didn't video ourselves doing them. And we didn't video ourselves while we were wearing our school uniforms. And then post it on the media phenomenon of our decade. For the online planet to see. And for any passing know-it-all newspaper columnist to hold it up as an example of some wider social trend.
Maybe, given the opportunity, we would have done it. The anatomy of the teenage brain has not changed in a mere generation. But we didn't have the technology, so couldn't even imagine the possibility that our youthful idiocies would be played on a loop for people from Monaghan to Mumbai.
Previous generations of teenagers have kept their indiscretions between themselves, their friends, their diaries, their private memories or their suppressed regrets.
This generation of under-twenties will become the first to find that their are now available on instant replay - possibly for the rest of their lives.
As they make their way through the world, they'll leave behind a digital landfill. Discarded Bebo sites. Half-chewed blogs. Tossed out YouTube videos and abandoned Flickr pages.
So this is the first generation that will not be able to truly leave their youth behind. And you have to have been through your youth to fully appreciate what an awful prospect that is.
Then again, maybe this won't seem such a terrible idea to them. They may grow out of Bebo, and their boasts of alcoholic escapades and sexual conquests. They may leave behind the photo galleries that back up the boasts with evidence. But they will graduate to other social networking sites, which are either already in place or will develop to meet their needs. There, they will share pics of the kids, and communicate through sentences that don't look as if they have been first put through a shredder.
More than 50 per cent of MySpace users are over 35, so the online home isn't confined to the fresh-faced and innocent.
But the newer generation is the first to enter and leave adolescence having gleefully relinquished its privacy. Given that teenagers have traditionally spent much of their time and energy trying to keep parents and siblings from gaining entry into their rooms, it's fascinating to see how few qualms they now have about letting the rest of the planet into their lives.
By flaunting themselves so freely, it begs the connected question of when they have the right to ask us to look away. If you insist on living an online life, even if it distorts rather than mirrors your "real life", at what point does the public end and the private begin? And at what point should it no longer affect their reputation? At what age does a Bebo boast of how many chicks they scored in Gran Canaria become redundant? At one point can that online persona be separated from their actual one? When does it no longer matter that there's a video floating around of them in a drunken heap, or messing, or fighting?
Among a generation for which fame is a career ambition, perhaps they can ape celebrities who seek to manipulate and regulate the levels of attention or privacy for their own ends, but then turn around and complain bitterly when their privacy is "invaded".
There has long been an assumption that humanity wants its privacy guarded. And yet, this generation has come along and proven that it's not as simple as that. They're not fearful of a quasi-Orwellian society - they actually feed off it. They want to be watched. In seeking as many online "friends" as possible, they also yearn to be judged.
In fact, they have shaped this particular surveillance society, even developing a form of newspeak through which to communicate, paring down the language to its skeleton, and rattling it until all the vowels fall out. But unlike Orwell's characters, they are unlikely to become an "unperson". It will not be easy to have a past life extinguished.
