Don't make your life an open book
For most members of Generation Y, just going to a party or a concert isn't enough - the event doesn't really happen until the photographic or video evidence is uploaded on to Facebook.
Nowhere will this be truer than this year's leavers' celebrations.
Though it might seem like a good idea at the time, taking photos or video footage, or sending sexy picture text messages to a boyfriend or girlfriend can act not just as a platform for bullying, but also have repercussions for career prospects if the material is made public.
Young people who posted evidence of their leavers' escapades online faced a raft of possible consequences, said Julian Dooley, senior research fellow and scientific director of cyberbullying at Edith Cowan University's Child Health Promotion Research Centre.
"They are there to let their hair down and have a good time and technology is so pervasive, pretty much 100 per cent of the young people at leavers will have a phone," he said.
"You can imagine in those environments there's going to be an increased risk of potentially harmful material being recorded."
Teens could suffer profoundly when they were unwittingly or unknowingly photographed or filmed while engaged in acts they believed were private, such as sexual encounters, or being directly bullied.
"We've had reports from young people who've had these kinds of videos put up and they see the counter (of people watching) going up and up," Dr Dooley said.
"They've said repetitive viewing is like reliving the event, and the damage that it does to your social status and your self-esteem can be much worse than the damage done from physical face-to-face bullying."
As well as being difficult to remove, having intimate or embarrassing information could also be devastating to teens at a crucial time in their development.
"This is the time when they are still developing their sense of self, of identity and place in society, particularly for leavers who are venturing out and away from the home," Dr Dooley said. "To have something like that happen can be really damaging."
And those who were simply posting pictures of themselves or their mates having what they thought was a good time usually did not know how permanent the images could be.
"You can put a picture up and five minutes later take it down and for all intents and purposes no-one else can see it but that picture still sits on a social networking website's server," Dr Dooley said. "You don't know that someone in that five minutes hasn't saved it as a file."
He cautioned leavers about who they allowed to access their social- networking profiles and to consider whether they would be comfortable handing out the same images in Perth's CBD on a busy day.
"Because that's essentially what you are doing - you don't know who you are handing the information over to in many cases," he said.
US statistics show 40 per cent of potential employers search Google for information on candidates.
"Australia may not be not far behind, and the number one reason people in the US don't get hired or asked in for job interviews is because of content, including inappropriate pictures or comments, on social-networking sites," Dr Dooley said.
"Even if you're not ashamed of it, somebody who doesn't agree with it may see it and if you have two equal candidates it's not a big stretch to figure out who will be offered a position."
Dr Dooley said leavers now needed to live their lives knowing much of what they did would end up on the internet.
"One night of fun at leavers can have an impact, so being careful and cautious and conscious of what you're doing is really important," he said. "You're better off having some control over what's out there and who can see it."
