The downside of Facebook
They might be the fast food of modern self-expression, but even when separated by a half- millennium, social networking sites have a lot in common with the traditional painted portrait.
Both are about more than a simple historical memento. They are about power, influence and status.
Young people who spend hours choosing wallpaper and music and composing grammatically incorrect biographies for their sites are peacocking no less than the Medici family did during the Renaissance.
And people who would lament the loss of the history of Western portraiture if the net had been invented earlier, take note: it would also have meant fewer of those fusty portraits of royalty, which is about the only solace we can take from the recent foray by the Queen onto a royals channel on YouTube.
Clearly the start of the revival of British comedy, the first few postings showed Prince Charles shuffling papers while on the telephone (the subtext %26ndash; that we are looking at a very important man %26ndash; could have been lifted straight from Raphael%26#39;s portrait of Lorenzo de Medici) and a thrilling expose of Buckingham Palace garden parties (%26quot;The gates open at 3pm but guests often start queueing much earlier%26quot;).
But in the wake of the revelry that ushered in another year, we can be certain that unlike a lot of other social networking converts, Her Maj was not going to spend New Year%26#39;s Day recovering from a blinder and posting photographs of the Windsor Castle knees-up.
Some years ago, London woman Claire Swire infamously found out the hard way that it is inadvisable to put your sexual peccadillos into email form. But social networking has upped the ante. They are public message boards on which mostly young people detail all sorts of incriminating evidence of a personal life that has spawned the acronym NSFW (that%26#39;s Not Safe For Work).
When a news story breaks, journalists now go straight to the net to sniff around for personal details of perpetrators or victims. Stephanie Gestier and Jodie Gater, two 16-year- old high school students who committed suicide in April, left behind enough electronic material to spawn a week-long media beat-up about a suicide- obsessed subculture.
The two young women at the centre of a Melbourne gunman drama last year had their MySpace pages turned into public property, with the unfortunate result that the extroverted sexuality detailed there turned them into something less than innocent victims.
More recently, Carlos Sousa junior, the young San Francisco man killed by an escaped tiger, has been remembered around the world from his own words on his MySpace page: %26quot;My true homies play basketball and go out to the movies and partyharder (sic) than a rock star, only sumdayz wen I have my days off work.%26quot;
But you do not need to be bitten by tragedy to feel the sting of unwanted exposure. Many users don%26#39;t know that information posted on sites such as Facebook and Bebo is there permanently.
Photographs and video might come and go at the whim of the user, but the sites archive all material, regardless of whether an account is set to private, and it can often be accessed through linked accounts and good old Google.
An increasing number of employers and education institutions have cottoned on to this fact to turn the web%26#39;s Summer of Love into something more sinisterly Orwellian.
In Britain, about 10 per cent of employers are already using the web as an informal part of the reference process, prompting the nation%26#39;s privacy commissioner to embark on an education campaign warning young people about the dangers of posting personal information online.
The employers do not need an epic incident of violence, drug-taking or bigotry to throw a CV in the bin; someone foolhardy enough to post shots of themselves in party mode might just find themselves going to the back of the queue.
It might seem like a great idea to post pictures of yourself snogging a policeman at New Year%26#39;s Eve celebrations, getting semi-naked in a spa or partaking in myriad nefariously fun activities that were replicated around the nation. It is doubtful that the head of accounting at KPMG will think the same.
Be careful of posting those party mementoes online; they could last a lifetime.
