'Life is pain,' deadpans the swashbuckling hero of the movie The Princess Bride. "Anyone who says different is selling you something." I'm afraid that this was the quote that drifted across my consciousness on Thursday as the latest news of how the internet has changed everything - again - was unveiled. According to an Ofcom study, we are all spending more time online and on our mobiles than ever, with pensioners spending longer surfing the web than any other age group. And women - they're at it too, more than men in key demographics, with the general consensus seeming to be that this is a marvellous and life-enhancing thing. You know, not just for the people trying to sell them stuff.
Ever since Al Gore invented it in whatever year the anonymous Wikipedia contributor insists he did, the internet has been hailed as a sort of algorithm that produces a new utopia each time it is fed back into itself. That said, we should probably refer to it as an itopia, because all our old words seem to be regarded as hopelessly beneath the task of delineating this brave new world that has such people in it. Or rather, us. It still has just us in it.
So brave is it, though, that there are those who would have you believe it is a new, parallel world to the one in which we are required to actually live. The virtual world Second Life had 9 million residents at time of going to press, and there will have been a few thousand more new immigrants since, keen to fashion themselves into slightly hotter versions of themselves, or to add a leopard's tail, before toddling off to meet other virtual folk, possibly over a nice virtual pint.
Myself, I would hazard that Second Life will fairly swiftly become as irksome as first life. They've already had a terrorist attack of sorts there. They've got a paedophile problem. Yet as time goes on, the sense of absurdity recedes, and having your avatar walk into a hardware store to spend real money on virtual fixtures and fittings seems something for which you probably wouldn't now get committed - even when you've been saying you'll fix your real life kitchen cabinets for six months.
Those keen to highlight the absurdity, however, include the website Get A First Life, which parodies Second Life's homepage beneath the banner "Your World. Sorry About That". "First Life is a 3D analogue world where server lag does not exist," tempts the blurb. "Work. Reproduce. Perish. Fornicate using your actual genitals ... America's teens, your First Life dream world awaits. Hang out at the mall! Embarrass yourself in gym class! Get acne! Experiment with mind-altering recreational drugs!" The message is clear: a life lived online is a life half lived.
A friend who works in the computer games industry once told me that research had shown their teenage target market was turned off by the cinema for one simple reason. They disliked entertainment experiences in which they were not the protagonists. A movie was something you sat passively in front of; a game was something you controlled.
Yet it is difficult not to conclude that most virtual experiences, even the virtual freedom afforded by the internet, offer the illusion of choice in a world that is still stacked against the individual soul, and where social exclusion is on the rise. This week, in response to Ofcom, several commentators highlighted the potential for people to form communities that can use their strength in numbers to exert pressure on and change issues that affect them. It may be pessimistic, but I am unconvinced that internet campaigns are some new beast able to exert changes that their ancestors could not. Consider the case earlier this year, where the fact that a million people signed an e-petition against road pricing caused many to predict that so many voices simply had to count. Preposterous, of course. One almost felt it was time for the prime minister to emerge from Downing Street and offer a reminder of how things work. "Residents of this house have been ignoring petitions since the internet was all fields," he might have breezed, "and they'll be ignoring them well after we're all eating our meals in the form of a single pill. I do hope that clears things up. Good day."
No matter how futuristic and iconoclastic it may seem to be, the internet is just geography, a locus where the same fundamental truths of human nature will always endure. Of course, its brilliance as a communication tool has freed up people's time. Pensioners who would previously have had to spend the day trawling bookshops looking for the last copy of Fly Fishing by JR Hartley can now simply order it from Amazon, and spend the rest of the afternoon more usefully cursing themselves for failing to keep a single copy of a book they in fact wrote.
Yet, is there a creative boom in the arts about which we are all unaware? Are people getting cleverer? More important, are they getting happier? In short, how are they spending all this saved time?
Alas, in a development that condemns us to another trip down the rabbit hole, Ofcom's research suggests that they are spending it on the internet.
Marina Hyde