I was born in the late 1960s, just before the 1969 launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which laid the foundation for today's internet. Today's mobile network youth might find it shocking that, aged ten, my idea of staying connected when cycling to nearby towns and villages was to have a ten pence piece in my pocket to phone home in the event of an emergency. My cycling trips netted me some free car and travel brochures, half a pornographic magazine and a semi-functioning Binatone tennis computer game console. Whether today's young have had their brains addled by some much easier access to such content I have some doubt (evidence is that today's youth are for the most part rather a progressive bunch), but I do recommend a bit more cycling. In the 1980s I marvelled at the arrival of the compact disc, even though I could not afford to buy one at the time. Still, eventually, their unencrypted digital formatting meant others would not have to pay, as the content of these discs would be uploaded and circulated online for nothing. My nephew still thinks CDs are coffeecup coasters. My time at university in the late 1980s and 1990s witnessed the rollout of online public access catalogues (that then grew into full-text content services), and then digital swipe cards (and usernames/passwords); the latter attempting to regulate access to the content made visible by the former. The millennium bug came and went or may never have come at all. 9/11 happened. Digital networks were said to have helped a new generation of terrorists, but also became ever more central to efforts to prevent terrorism. The early 2000s also saw chip and pin (as well as various new forms of digital encryption) kill off earlier forms of fraud, but in enabling the expansion of e-commerce also incited a new cat-and-mouse battle between encryption and intrusion. As an early de-adopter of social media channels perhaps I am immune to most of the disinformation that is going around, but perhaps that is itself fake news and I have filters and bubbles all my own.