Before you get carried away with happy-clappy enthusiasm for the liberation new technology brings, consider that if everyone can be a journalist everyone can be a spy. The web is searchable and the BBC managers who worry about what their staff write when they're off duty are not quite the little Hitlers they seem. Tweets and Facebook posts are taken down and used in evidence by the corporation's enemies, and not just by the Telegraph but, potentially by everyone with a political or commercial interest. You can ban people from going against company policy online, as many organisations do. But what happens when someone else tweets their opinions or, soon, captures an off-the-cuff remark in a bar or at a party from a supposedly impartial journalist or judge on Google Glass and broadcasts it?

The same spirit that encourages people to break away from the old controls also encourages them to refuse to believe that a civil servant or BBC journalist or judge can leave their political prejudices at home. I can see a spiral in which British institutions become more cramped and authoritarian. Free spirits leave. The wrong people stay and grow in number, until public life becomes like Newsnight: frightened and forgettable.