THE internet has brought a multitude of changes to our lives in the past two decades.

The way we shop, seek out information and communicate have been transformed by the ability to sit at home and find what we want with a mouse and a keyboard.

This technological revolution came about just as we were beginning to worry that people were losing the ability to converse with each other.

Longer working hours and the rising cost of buying drinks in pubs meant that too often in the evenings and at weekends many were sitting at home and staring at the TV rather than communicating.

Now that has all changed, but not every development has been wholly positive.

Last week Blackburn Rovers manager Michael Appleton felt it necessary to warn his players about using Twitter.

He said their tweets will be monitored and any team members making what he considers to be derogatory comments about the club will be fined or even fired.

The problem is that too many people pick up a smartphone or sit at a keyboard and seem to lose all common sense, if they ever had any to start with.

They just don’t seem to realise the enormous difference between making a controversial aside to a mate in a pub and putting it out on social media for hundreds of thousands to read.

A fair number of football stars in other clubs have already got themselves into trouble. It’s quite ridiculous that they just don’t seem to understand that an injudicious remark on twitter is reaching a larger audience than if they yelled it over the speakers at a game.

There are a whole army of people who are now posting the most malicious and nasty comments on websites simply because they are able to do so behind a pseudonym.

These cowards seem to get a kick out of dreaming up the most hateful thoughts, roaming the internet and then putting them online while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.

But their despicable activities may have a limited life.

The weekend saw a 24-year-old man appear in a Tyneside court charged with threatening to kill 200 American schoolchildren.

A comment was posted on a Facebook memorial page to a Tennessee girl killed in a crash.

In a country plagued by real life mass slaughters by deranged gunmen the comment led to parents keeping 3,000 children off school in one area.

Hopefully there’s a lesson in all this. It might seem a little old fashioned but shouldn’t we only ever write things that we would be happy to say to someone’s face.