After great amounts of resources were spent investigating the web’s dark powers, a report — sorry, “a vision of the web in the year 2020” — by the Social Issues Research Centre has made a momentous discovery: the internet makes no difference to our lives at all.

Technology might develop frighteningly fast, it says, but “if a web application . . . does not fulfil a timeless human need, it will not succeed”. And our needs are more basic than some might think — the centre comments: “Physical survival, passing genes to future generations and social bonding . . . inside our 21st-century skulls are essentially Stone Age brains.”

Online shopping, games and chat sites — the futuristic dimensions that are seemingly ensnaring the young — are but the legacy of tribal groupings in which we have spent “all but a very tiny fraction of our history and evolution”. E-mail takes us back “to the equivalent of an earlier form of social communication: chatting to one’s neighbour over the garden fence”. The net bridges the geographical distances of our increasingly mobile society, and returns the ritual to us. Churches, football clubs, the internet . . . methods of tribal cohesion adapt to circumstance.

“Timmy! Get in from that fresh air this instant and get back on YouTube.”

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