One night in my late teens me and my best friend from university plugged a 14.4 modem into a wall socket and uploaded our first website (technically it was his second). 14 years later I found it again, completely intact, in an Internet archive. That should make you stop and think for a moment.

Beneath every social media website or collaborative tool is a database, and truly deleting content from a database is considered to be a bad idea. Asking for it to happen usually makes engineers wince and mutter about ‘referential integrity’. Much better, they’ll argue, to label the content as obsolete and stop displaying it. Storage is now so cheap that it’s usually commercially preferable to hide the data than work to remove it.

All of which assumes one is actively considering the question of what to do with old content. Increasingly, at least on a personal level, we don’t. Social media and collaborative tools are inherently conversational, and the natural tendency of most individuals (once they’re comfortable with online discussion) is to treat their contributions as they might their words in a face-to-face dialogue. Once said, or typed, it’s history. Unless you’re a public figure you don’t expect to be quoted back to yourself later, and the rate of technological change has rendered most of what we typed barely years ago inaccessible (just how would you read documents stored on floppy disks today?). So the persistence of our comments and postings is rarely front of mind when we make them.

That’s not to say we are unthinking contributors. Thanks to some painful lessons learned about indiscretions posted to Facebook, most people are also conscious of the need to exercise common sense when participating in online discussions. That applies even more for internal spaces, where it is usual for employees’ contributions to be attributed. But what if even the good things we write (or perhaps the ‘good at the time of writing’ things) have the capacity to cause us problems in the future?

A decade ago a multi-national I knew decided to create a database of every key promise or commitment made by its senior leaders in the previous 5 years. In the then largely un-digitised world that task was laborious enough to warrant a sizable team of researchers, despite the relatively small amount of data that had to be located and sifted. Digitisation and the evolution of search technologies mean that even with the explosion of content in the 2.0 era, a contemporary exercise would not only be easier, but yield richer data.

What that multi-national was interested in was transparency and accountability, words very much beloved of the social media scene. To be clear, this was a defensive action: the company knew external special interest groups were effectively performing the same exercise and it wanted to understand its exposure. The important aspect for us now is that the level of granularity was at the corporate level: this was about what a company had said (albeit through the mouths of its people), not an individual. At that time the only individuals who could reasonably expect to invite that level of scrutiny (and indeed generate that much easily-accessed content) would be public figures.

A decade later, within organisations the capacity for ordinary employees to publish and navigate the published content of colleagues has changed completely. If your organisation is investing heavily in collaborative platforms today, think ahead to 2015 and imagine the body of searchable, attributable content that will attach to any future member of middle or senior management who has risen through the ranks. It will be non-trivial. It’s tempting to think that because common sense will have been exercised throughout, we have nothing to worry about; but think about three practical aspects of communicating as a leader:

• Often you must speak or write on behalf of your role or organisation, not as a private individual reflecting her/his own views
• It’s not uncommon for a business to change direction, rendering obsolete what was said or promised before
• It’s also not uncommon to be plain wrong

None of these make you a liar or inauthentic, but in many disputes advantage is gained by pointing to opponents’ documented mistakes and changes-of-heart. It’s almost a rule that candidates in any US election will have a charge of ‘flip-flopping’ levelled against them, and the commentariat will mysteriously forget that good decision making often means knowing when to change direction. By comparison, corporate leaders have historically had an easier ride: beyond heavily unionised environments the degree to which leadership cadres could control the internal news agenda and re-position issues has been significant. As organisations move towards giving everyone a voice, as well as the tools to search the past, change is unavoidable.

When the controversy first raged about drunken pictures posted to Facebook and how this might affect an individual’s future career prospects, many advanced the argument that changing social attitudes would quickly negate the risk. I’d like to think that will happen, but I’m mindful that forty years on from the 1960s politicians still break into a sweat when asked about smoking dope at university.

The smart Gen Y individual already knows how to manage her/his profile, and will leverage that advantage over less discreet peers in coming years. Moreover, the emergence of sites like the (quickly suppressed) Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests that, at least in the public sphere, some have new misgivings about their digital footprints.

If attitudinal change is required for organisations to live comfortably with the legacy of long term (digital) transparency, it probably begins with the collaboration cultures many of us are trying to build today. It probably requires us to work with IT and KM specialists to look critically at issues of content curation, the longevity of systems, and what we really mean – and want – when we use words like ‘transparency’ (and whether the answers hold true at all levels of the organisation).

It would be a shame if we rushed headlong into the next level of collaboration (which I believe offers us many benefits), only to later recoil at the thought of accidentally building our own Panopticon from the inside.