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Use of social networking sites represents the single largest increase in Internet use in the last two years.

• 60% of British Internet users use online social networking sites, up from 49% in 2009, and 17% in 2007.

• Use of social networking by people under 25 has stabilized at around 90%.

• Almost all the growth in social networking since 2009 has been among employed people aged 25-55 - uniformly, about 15% growth since 2009.

• 61% of Internet users in 2011 "mainly" use search engines to find information: a 3% decline since 2009, possibly reflecting people using links on social network sites as entry points.

• Non-users are more likely to express fears about the Internet or technology; making the digital divide very difficult to bridge. 54% of non-users fear they "might break" new technologies, compared with 18% of first generation users, and 7% of next generation users.

• People with no educational qualifications are much less likely to be Internet users (31% are Internet users), than those with basic (80%), further (79%), or higher education (91% are Internet users).

• People with disabilities are about half as likely to use the Internet as people without disabilities (41% vs 78% are Internet users).

• People with higher household income are more likely to use the Internet. 99% of people with household incomes exceeding £40,000 are Internet users, compared with 65% for incomes of £12,000-£20,000, and only 43% of those with household incomes of less than £12,500.

• Retired people are much less likely to use the Internet (37% of retired people) than students (99%) or employed people (87%).

• Young people are much more likely to use the Internet than older people. 99% of people aged 14-17 are Internet users, compared with 80% of people aged between 45-54, and only 33% of people aged over 65.

Mr. Slater’s situation — and numerous others — demonstrate that we are only beginning to glimpse the consequences of living in a digital era where what we post  is filed away on a very public and very permanent file. But we may be giving short shrift to the importance of nostalgia.

As more of us live our lives out on the Web and update our statuses, posting to Twitter and Tumblr becomes nearly second nature, more instinctive. The fear and concern over what might happen to all those ephemeral bits of data is overshadowed by the rewards and personal delight that come from sharing your lives with a community online in the moment.

Is the answer to purge all the online profiles and social networking accounts that you no longer use and clean up the ones you do use?

The biggest issue is nostalgia.

Those profiles, however embarrassing they might be, are like micro time capsules, snapshots of myself at an earlier era–different hairstyles, friends and taste in music. Although I still have boxes of photographs and mementos stashed away under my bed, there isn’t a central analog repository of my major memories, no big scrapbook with each moment I want to remember. They mostly live online.