A few years ago I had the notion that I was going to make a crazy radio documentary about ‘framing’ in emails – that is, chopping someone’s text up in order to reply to it in chunks. I wanted Original Message to have the rhythm of an ever-lengthening plain text conversation, with clips of linguist David Crystal repeating himself over and over and over.

It was a rubbish idea. Luckily, figuring out how to represent that structure in linear audio made my brain ache and I gave up.

I’d forgotten all about it until this morning when I watched Hyperland, an infinitely better documentary by Douglas Adams. In it, Adams dreams of a futuristic, non-linear computer world of multimedia content, with Tom Baker playing an obsequious MS paperclip character. All the buzzwords of 2009 are there – which is remarkable given that the film was made in 1990, before you or I had ever heard of the World Wide Web.