There are those who greatly fear the internet — and, really, who can blame them? It’s simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, no one’s in charge of it and, if you gained most of your information about it from watching the 1986 film War Games, there’s still the lingering belief that if you press the wrong four buttons in sequence, you might accidentally initiate the launch-code for the USA’s entire tranche of nuclear warheads during a game of tic-tac-toe.

In this event, there is no King of The Internet to whom one can appeal for clemency. There is no office building with “1, The Internet” written on a brass plate by the door, in the event of your needing to get together a (very hurriedly organised and probably quite brief) protest about the end of the world.

No wonder people can find the internet a trifle jivey. I mean, in terms of non-jiveyness, it makes something such as gravity — which is very jivey — look not jivey at all. It makes gravity look as normal as . . . bread.

But fear of the internet is — like fear of being unable to say “Dizzee Rascal” without sounding sarcastic — an age thing, apparently. For in a report published last week, Professor Michael Hulme of Lancaster University found that, in those aged 16-24, fear of the internet is a rare problem. In fact, they’re not scared of it at all; 45 per cent said that they are actually happiest when they’re online. Already this has been seen as a prompt for much wailing that we have raised a technologically obsessed generation who prefer being online to the real world, blah, wail, blah, etc.

Well, at the risk of being obvious, OF COURSE THEY PREFER IT. OF COURSE. IT IS OBVIOUS.

For starters, if you know where to go, you can spend all day galloping around the internet, sampling the very greatest achievements of human creativity — music, films, TV, books, pictures of Britney Spears with no clothes on — without spending a single penny. This is the stuff that, when I was between 16 and 24, and had to do the 20th-century thing of “going to the shops”, cost me an absolute fortune. No wonder the youth of today binge-drink — they’re the first generation who can afford to.

Frankly, as a teenager I, too, would have been wandering around Middlesbrough town centre at 2am, wearing only one shoe and sporadically vomiting on flat surfaces, if I hadn’t already spaffed all my cider money on Aztec Camera CDs and paperbacks.

But you know what? We do down the internet if we think of it merely as a dazzling comprehensive resource of arts, music, poetry, film, news, science and information on literally every subject known to humanity. It’s not just “like an incredibly good library”. No — there’s a fairly strong argument that internet is, in fact, much, much better than the entire “real world”.

It’s just easier being a human being there — not surprisingly, given that human beings invented it for human beings to be in; unlike the world, which we did not and are, let’s face it, still busking our way through.

The real world is fraught with awfulnesses — extremes of temperature, bumping into people you dislike, wasps, falling down wells — that simply don’t happen online; or if they do, are much easier to deal with. If you “bump into” someone that you don’t like on the internet, you can totally ignore them — without any of that awkward, trying-to-avoid-eye-contact, standing-at-a-face-hiding-angle stuff you have to do at parties.

On Twitter, you can go further, and “block” people that you dislike, which instantly erases them from your life — something which, in the real world, you can only approximate by murdering them and then throwing them in the canal. The vast superiority of the internet in this respect is, I think, obvious. Then there’s the “facelessness” of the internet. People quack on about that endlessly, as if it’s a terrible thing. Personally, the facelessness is my absolute favourite bit. On the internet, no one knows your age, race, sex, physical disabilities, or if you’re badly dressed and really shouldn’t be wearing that top with that hat. It’s a truly egalitarian place — like the Starship Enterprise but better.

Even more amazing than all that is that on the internet — and unlike the Enterprise, which was a bit biased in this subject — it doesn’t matter if you’re as ugly as a pan of germs. Online, you’re as attractive as your thoughts and your ability to express them. Or, often — to be strictly truthful — your ability to link to pictures of cats doing amusing things such as sitting in a Barbie car or falling off a wall.

Either way, it’s a pleasing progression from pretty much all of previous human history, in which social victory was almost unfailingly accorded to either a) hot chicks or b) men who could punch other men very hard.

No wonder the youngsters — the geeky, awkward, shy, overweight — feel happier on the internet.

On top of all that, cyberspace has such a gentle civility to it as a method of communication that it makes all other alternative look like acts of borderline war. Telephones, for instance. My God, but as the days go by, they seem more and more brutal. How did we ever start using them in the first place?

When you call someone, essentially you suddenly materialise in their life, screaming, “ME ME! ME ME! IT’S ME! TALK TO ME!” The telephone was first invented at a time when you could readily purchase cocaine in any chemist. I think we can draw our own conclusions. Using one is an act of superlative self-confidence — the kind of thing only contestants on The Apprentice would do; or, maybe, Bono.

The internet, on the other hand, is a communication method of infinite precision and subtlety. E-mails quietly line up in your inbox, like swans waiting for bread.

Messageboards provide arenas of public conversation that — unlike the forebears of nightclubs, ballrooms and roller-rinks — allow every word to be clear. It’s quick like mercury, as mannerly as James Stewart rising his hat to an old lady, and inclusive as the Ark.

I can only presume the 65 per cent who aren’t happier on the internet are on a very slow dial-up.

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