function that a proud mother might like to record in her online baby album. Of course, the mother is a loony as well. Who in God's name wants to have a picture of herself breast-feeding on Facebook? The problem is that nobody can do anything any more without putting pictures of it on the internet. It's as if something doesn't exist unless it has been recorded. No night out is complete without a shot of the participants cheering, dishevelled, thumbs up in mindless tandem, waving their pint glasses towards the shutter of the barman's mobile phone so that people they once met on a bus, or sat next to for a maths class in 1987, can see what a great time they had in the "Thursday, Basildon" album on Flickr. A million gadgets feed the voracious demands of the online album. Everything takes pictures. It's as though the whole world has been to see Desmond 'Q' Llewelyn and come back with a phone, an iPod, a Macbook, a pen and a sandwich which all double as cameras. We complain about CCTV and Big Brother government, but spend our entire time snapping each other in every possible situation and publishing the results. I was playing internet poker the other day, when a stranger typed into the chat box: "LUV'D THE PIX OF U ON FACEBK. MUST HAV BEEN SUM PARTY!" What pictures? What party? This sinister comment clearly denoted some unwitting snap of me, in some kind of disarrayed state, published