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Ah, life's little humiliations. Comedy falls, awful girlfriends, ill-advised karaoke, flatshare food poisoning... We suffer, we learn, we hope no one brings it up at the dinner table. Of course, mildly embarrassing incidents are generally forgotten by everyone except the victim, for whom the memory festers and grows into a horrid cringey tumour of self-loathing.

As a kid, I once projectile vomited the length of a luxury coach to the disgusted delight of 200 classmates. Normal, right? Mundane, even. But to my 12-year-old self it was the end of the known world: Tears! Jeers! Being made to sit at the front with Geography teachers! Oh, the shame of my delicate inner-ear and the inadequately maintained B-roads of southern Scotland. Of course, if you asked my now-adult school friends, they would only have a vague recollection of this event, with most having utterly forgotten me and the trip.

Spare a thought then for those whose misery is captured forever online. YouTube, Livejournal, Flickr and myriad similar forums allow the most horrendous social mortification to live on indefinitely through our computer screens.

Of course, celebrity mishaps have always been fair game. Denis Norden was presenting It'll Be Alright on the Night long before YouTube founder Steve Chen was even a twinkle in a zygote's eye. Perhaps as a viewing public we feel that telly folk are just asking for it. If Anthea Turner will insist on turning up in our living rooms and telling us how to fold our towels, then it seems inexcusably less vampiric to laugh at her head catching

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fire on a 1990s kids' show. And, as cold-hearted as it may seem, it's possible to watch daytime queen Judy Finnigan's live bra-flashing on several online gawpsites. But there are more sinister clips splashed over celeb sites, such as TMZ, that feel akin to paying a penny to spectate at Bedlam. A giggling Britney manacled and surrounded by hollering paparazzi, the Tom Cruise rants, that even the Church of Scientology would rather you didn't see, or a hysterical Heather Mills McCartney on GMTV. Simultaneously unwatchable and unmissable.

But what about the embarrassment of the general public? It used to be that a video-captured kick in the groin was £200 on You've Been Framed, but now there's no recompense whatsoever as your beloved 'mates' stick your most recent pratfall on their website for all to see. YouTube is, of course, the best place to trawl, and while the majority of clips involve consenting adults, there's a fair bit of mom-sanctioned kid slapstick. There's the baby trying its hardest to eat a lemon, the inexplicably popular 'Charlie Bit Me' kid, who seems to be mainly amusing to Americans who have never heard a non-American toddler whinging to the sniggering of his own mother. Then there's the unfortunate 'Star Wars Kid', a French-Canadian high-school student who filmed himself staggering around with a pretend lightsaber and then needed counselling when the video went viral and he became a worldwide joke.

But there are more subtle ways of losing your dignity online. Blogger made it easy to make a personal diary public in 2000, by which time, thankfully, I was well out of my teens and capable of understanding the uncomfortable juxtaposition of 'diary' and 'public'. Had Blogger been around when I was 14, there would doubtless be a cache out there featuring my toe-curling adolescent poetry, sensitive musings and undying paeans to pubescent, Lynx-toting boys. As if to illustrate my point, a young relative of mine was recently humbled by the discovery of his blog by his own mother. Ever the hipster, mum left a cheerful comment with lots of kisses on a post, which graphically detailed his love for a class sweetheart. Dreadful.