It would have been difficult to foresee the full social effects of the internet. It is now apparent that our lives have been changed, forever, in ways that are simultaneously warped and wonderful.

Being socially and politically aware was difficult enough in a pre-online world. In this new, ‘wired’ age, where perceived connections of opinion are shared across social media, the intersection of money, politics and psychological manipulation has created an entirely new ‘world’ in which groups of people live immersed in opinion which they believe to be shared by the majority of that world.

To my mind, a powerful way of visualising this is as a cafe, where we may drop in at any time of the world’s day and night. It never closes, though we may experience peak response determined by the physical location (otherwise irrelevant) of…