English Audio Request

Just because we can record every drunken moment or schoolboy prank – and post them online – doesn't mean we should. The YouTube generation will regret it, argues Michael Bywater
It would have done for me, for a start. The day I got my hand stuck in a park bench while attempting to talk my girlfriend into coming home with me. Riding my poxy little Mobylette moped from Leckhampton to my college, standing on the seat. Riding it through the college court, naked. God help us. Failed glider aerobatics (don't ask). Amateur dramatics (don't ask). Professional dramatics (don't even think of asking). Dressing up as a clown, wandering about with a silver-topped cane, ditto green nail varnish and eyeshadow, ditto Spanish riding boots. Humping. Almost certainly, humping. Yes. There'd have been humping, and trailing that chap who went mad through the night streets of Bruges, and now I come to think of it what about what happened in Heidelberg and indeed that evil night in the Lake District and, oh yes, that other evil night in the Lake District, not to mention Minnesota and, oh God, Beverly Hills and that damned Cessna 206 Stationair and the Grand Canyon, that was a do, that was. Oh dear.
Oh dear and thank God, because it was all private. It's all over. It's all in the past, and that's the thing about the past: things used to be in the past, but now they're not. They're on YouTube (motto: "Broadcast Yourself") and Vimeo and Facebook and Idiotvids. Everything that happens – the seedy phrase is "life experiences" – is sucked into the voracious eye of the camcorder or the jittery blur of the video phone, uploaded (3G, broadband, Edge, you take your pick but they still get your money), transferred into Flash and made available to the world.
For ever.
The idea of "in the past" is in the past. Impossible to put aside childish things because Google knows where they are; and even if you take them down, the Wayback Machine will cache them for all time. So that's that for the past. You want to know the future? You want to sup full-on horrors? There's a poll for that, done to promote the Flip MinoHD, a thing the size of a packet of cigarettes – remember them? We had cigarettes when we still had privacy; now, we'd film ourselves smoking them behind the bike sheds – that shoots up to an hour of high-quality video. The survey says that a third of 18-24 year olds "see a time when they would post videos on social networks every day".