Ranging from Miranda Sings to President Obama and even Helen Keller, everyone alive or dead is likely represented on social media. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr have given people a vector to communicate their opinions about anything under the sun to the entire world instantaneously. Social media for better, or for worse, has driven its tendrils deep into the lives of our species, and it’s not likely to come undone.

Each website has its own gimmick; on Facebook you have a network of all of the people you know, on Twitter you can spill your opinions on an unsuspecting world of readers, and on Pinterest you can look at pictures. However mundane these might seem, social media creates a portfolio of an individual simply based on their behavior online.

This amazing method of mass communication also makes use of the Internet to cover global events, such as coverage of the war in Syria, protests in the Ukraine, and even the hotel horror stories coming out of the Sochi Olympics. This capacity, however, is only matched by its ability to destroy the individual. After all, if you are pouring your soul onto the Internet, is there any room for privacy?

In the professional world careers can be made and demolished in the blink of an eye, for example, the “inappropriate tweet.” This concept is not unique to Twitter, but has become common across the Internet. It entails two things, first that someone has posted something that is not socially acceptable on social media, and second that the post became popular enough to make the person in question look bad, and moreover, their company. The result is often a slap on the wrist, but also can include termination, such as a PR executive who reportedly posted a racist tweet about AIDS in Africa, and was subsequently fired from her position in the company. She was quoted as being ashamed of her actions and bought the bullet for public, social faux pas.

In a world with such a complicated mix of overt and covert, it is difficult to grasp the correct way to act online. Even though you might not have your name attached to your Twitter, it doesn’t mean people can’t find you. When we look at the case of Amanda Todd, a regular teenage girl who looked for friendship online and instead found the cyber bully who drove her to suicide, the identity of the bully was not known until the hack-tavist group, Anonymous, tracked the computer he used and ousted him to the public.

Now these are extreme examples of social media gone awry, but they are not as removed from Gustavus as some might think. Even small cases of students complaining about other students can quickly become big issues. Perhaps it won’t be publicized to the entire world and punished for the cruel nature of the post, but it can still do a great deal of harm to other people by unleashing the plague of drama on people who don’t want anything to do with it.

Of course people are going to be rude to other people, and I know that we don’t live in a perfect world, but that shouldn’t excuse people using the relative anonymity of the Internet to create a passive-aggressive paradise to complain about the world they live in. The implications of such actions are at best cruel and unnecessary, and at worst can come back to haunt the author with a vengeance.

So please if you are having a problem with someone, talk to him or her about it, if you are having a problem with the campus or a job, talk to an administrator. But above all else, don’t make a bad situation potentially worse by stabbing someone or something in the back online. What is written on the Internet cannot be easily erased, it is lasting, indelible ink.