A few months ago, I spoke to some art students, and we talked about the internet and its effects. It appears that the cool thing now for arty kids in their early 20s is to go offline. They spoke happily of closing their Facebook accounts and giving up Twitter. The internet, they suggested, has become a bit of a Dad thing. They seemed to me to be much less excited about it than my own generation is. It was as boring to them as television was to me when I was in my 20s – I just wasn’t arsed about it; it was what middle-aged people did – and I wonder now if the coming multitudes might not be so bad after all.