One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.

I'm more pro-technology than people probably realize.

It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.

[One of my kids ]is not named after Aldous Huxley. I haven't even read Brave New World!

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.