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all the people I hung around with were at art school or were involved in fashion, or creative people interested in rebelling. It was complemented by the music but the actual scene didn't last very long. It did, however, send big ripples across the pond. Then people started getting into the charts and the New Romantic scene was made up of a lot of people who were originally punks. It was a time of experimentation, especially with the music. Then there were those who did punk by numbers. But it was still a great time.

what matters is how a child engages with this material. A passing curiosity may be easily satisfied and the interest abandoned; but sexual images have a special vividness and power, and may become addictive, as can many other internet activities, such as chatting or shopping or gaming. Personal accounts by people who have developed an obsession with pornography are disturbing: "It almost lodges itself into your mind, like a parasite sucking away the rest of your life," explains 16-year-old Malcolm, who participated in a 2007 study and reported spending between three to four hours each day visiting pornographic sites.

As well as the prospect of teenage boys watching violent porn, there is a concern about how it might distort their attitudes towards sex and women.

students were conscious that their messages were public and exercised mature self-editing in their online behaviour, with no incidences of inappropriate content being posted during the project. Although students were aware that their messages were being monitored by academic staff, in survey responses they stated that they did not regard this as an intrusion, and indeed frequently used Twitter in preference to alternative channels such as email to contact tutors to ask questions or arrange meetings. Approximately half of the students involved in the project have continued to use Twitter without the iPod Touch devices.

Where in our brain do we keep our ABCs? How does our brain provide us with the use of alphabetic characters without thought? I am handwriting this sentence in my writer’s notebook. The letters flow out of my pen as if they were a fluid flowing from my fingertips rather like sweat. Nothing for which I really have to use my brain.

Professor Fairbairn added: "No doubt all those named contributed to the research. However, I find it difficult to understand how 144 individuals, however close their working relationship, could be involved in writing it.

"I find it even more difficult to imagine how any assessment at all could be made of their contribution when it comes to awarding academic brownie points."

The problem is not new. In 1996, John Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Bath, produced a paper titled "Trends in multi-authored papers in economics".

He noted that while "the economist of the early postwar years was typically a solitary worker ... the economists of today are much more inclined to hunt in packs".

Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I've tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn't a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.

In essence, the network effect describes the positive externalities (value) of a product, service, or activity as more people use it. An organization taking advantage of the principle may refer to the practice as “crowdsourcing” (e.g. Wikipedia, Dell’s Ideastorm, iPhone Apps) taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowds”. Individuals may also aggregate and mobilize for a specific cause, be it political, civic or commercial (e.g. Moveon.org, Ukrainian orange revolution). The emergence of the latter can be of spontaneous and real-time nature.

When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone's e-mail conversations--your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose "Social City" game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B.

Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game "currency" for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising.