But on a day-to-day basis, the technological progress I lament the most is Google. Damn you Google! For while you might be the most powerful search-engine on the internet, allowing, each day, millions of people to access the information they need quickly and efficiently, you also brought with you, like a Messiah carrying big germs, self-Googling. And self-Googling is proving to be the ruination of the media, scientific and academic classes. Wonder why it took the fourth estate a year to discover Angus Deayton had sex, that we still haven’t come up with a cure for facial cancer, or how all those exam papers got marked incorrectly? It’s self-Googling — a habit that eats of a man’s mind like a canker gnaws the bone.

For those of you pure and inexplicably self-effacing enough not to have spent hours self-Googling — alone in the house, in a ratty dressing gown with the curtains drawn — allow me to give you a step-by-step recreation of the first self-Googling session; usually conducted by a healthy, happy individual in their late twenties to early thirties with, at that point, everything to live for.

“Sigh. Might as well stay online while I wait for that e-mail. Shall I Google Tania Strecker again, and see if she ‘got’ those ‘parcels’ that I ‘sent’? Tumpety-tum. Bah. Maybe I’ll Google the word ‘poo’ again — but how I tire of ratemypoo.com.

* ! *. Maybe — I — could — Google — me. * ! *. * !!! *.

“Tippety-tappety — I can’t believe I haven’t done this before! I wonder what impact I’ve made on the world? Maybe someone’s given a speech about me somewhere! Maybe Bill Clinton fancies me! Oh my God! 529 results! That’s more than I got for Juliet Bravo that time! I’m famous! Hang on, though — these are ... these are all about that one terrible think-piece I wrote about George Melly’s ties. They’ve only put the bad stuff on here! I had a stye that day! Where’s all my good stuff; like that joke I made about dust, or when I called Julia Brogan of Brookside a slag? Oh my God — caitlinmoranisaslag.com! What a terrible thing to say of a person! And look — here’s a messageboard where everyone’s pointing out that George Melly has never actually worn one of Hitler’s ties, as I said. I know! Can’t you cut me some slack? Pus in my eyes! Google has turned up the volume on the voices of the whole world’s conversations about me, and all I hear is hate. This is the most devastating experience of my life. I wonder where this link goes?”

As I mentioned before, it’s not just vaguely not-unfamous media people who self-Google — the science and academic worlds are rife with furtive self-saddle-sniffing. Replace “terrible think-piece about George Melly’s ties” with “misjudged paper on ants having the same DNA as balsawood” or “overly courageous educational report on hanging children from hooks to reduce truancy by 37 per cent”, and you can see why these jobs are simultaneously synonymous with extreme depression and extraordinarily low productivity.

My sister, who’s some kind of scientist, says that 30 per cent of any working day consists of colleagues e-mailing each other mentions of themselves that they’ve found on Google. If you have a loved one currently dying of a terrible wasting disease of the foot, and are hoping against hope they discover a cure before death comes, unless all the phone-lines of the world go down, I’d start picking out a big black hat now.

Of course, one thing that self-Googling does is allow us to revise our statistics on internet traffic. Previously it was presumed that 80 per cent or more of cyberspace was devoted to either crackpot religious theories or mimsies, wib-wubs and hoo-hillies, and that, without God and porn, the worldwide web would be little more than marksandspencer.com and three kids downloading jpegs of Eminem putting milk in before the tea.

Self-Googling, however, makes us realise that it’s not intra-faith disputes and sexual desire that makes the world go round, but long-standing petty rivalries between C-list journalists, scientists and academics. This could be key in long-term projects such as world peace: instead of UN resolutions and birth control, perhaps all of humanity just needs to go away together for a paint-balling and team-building weekend in Cheshire. Then we could all write reports about it and put them on the Net, along with flattering pictures, rather than that one where I appear to have a face carved out of a pumpkin by a blind man thinking of Chaka Khan.

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