When it comes to the Internet, we’re still in the prelude stage. So far, we’re only partly inside the machine and the machine is only partly inside us. But just you wait. As Tom Chatfield points out in one of his typically smart, elucidating BBC pieces, the term “online” is already redundant. We’re never anything but. His opening:

If I’m driving along in my car listening to GPS directions from Google Maps, am I online or offline? How about when I’m sitting at home streaming movies on demand? Skip forward a few years: if I’m dozing in my driverless car while my smartphone screens messages and calls, do words like “offline” and “online” even make sense?

The answer, I think, is that they make about as much sense as asking me today whether I have recently had any non-electric experiences. Electricity is so much a part of our world that it makes sense to ask how we use it – but no longer if or when we do. It’s a given.

The first time I went online, in the 1990s, it felt like a journey. I hooked my PC up to a space-age box called a modem, linked my modem to a phone line, and carefully instructed it to dial up the Internet Service Provider who would connect me to the World Wide Web. Much beeping and bleeping later, I was online in my own home: a miracle of modernity! Or rather, my computer was online – the only object in my home, and quite possible within a 10-mile radius, that had an internet connection.

Two decades later, this vanished world sounds like a kind of joke; a primitive realm of ritualised waiting and bizarrely isolated computation. You don’t really “go” online in 2016. Online is simply there, waiting.•