It needed to be written. A predictable wistful-turn-of-the-decade-piece hailing the end of the Noughties and the inevitable onset of the Tens (not quite as catchy. Tennies? Sounds a bit like over-the-counter diarrhoea medication. Give me time on this one) and a bit of token drivelling about the internet now being a vital yet terrible extension of our personalities and the carbon footprint that is ominously stamped all over our middle class fun... Well I refuse to give in. I like the 21st century and all of the soullessness it delivers. I like the convenience of expressing the very depth of my soul through one sentence in a neat little box beneath my Facebook profile picture. Now finally the emotionally awkward have a chance to communicate love/sadness/confusion through handy specific combinations of punctuation, :-) indeed. I enjoy the enigmatic nature of “Maybe Attending” events, shamelessly Wiki-ing my way through higher education, and being able to Google all those annoying things only machines remember, like the name of the man in Alvin and the Chipmunks and the second verse of the National Anthem.

Mostly I like the Internet. It replaces one’s brain, and even one’s phone (assuming you’re not happily wedded to your Blackberry), enabling you to access information and communication resources so superior to any other methods you previously wasted your time and thoughts on. (Remember letter-writing? How personal, thoughtful and ultimately pointless.) This is aside from the fact that when I type "how to" into Google, it immediately assumes that I am poised to search "how to kiss" which is a little mocking of certain insecurities. It is a sad world which provides binary data on the instructive formula of a decent kiss. Sad, yet beautifully efficient. And it apparently doesn’t stop at sexual ineptitude, entering the realms of spiritual preferences - when I type "I like", it insists that what I enjoy the most is "to think of Jesus as a mischievous badger". Which now, thanks to the force of the machine on my subconscious, I find myself doing. But despite these shortcomings, along with aiding paedophiles and promoting childhood obesity, it’s pretty good. I frenziedly type my name into search engines and bask in the glory of finding the multiple web pages dedicated to my very being (OK, I come up once in a passing reference on my school’s Old Girls page, and intriguingly on a website about avant-garde furniture - although to be completely honest, I don’t think the latter is actually anything to do with me...).

Just count how many times I have made use of the personal pronoun so far in this piece. It is literally all about me. I am proud to say I am an Internet Generation Narcissist (or IGN, which satisfyingly echoes “IBM” and therefore sounds suitably technical), forever tagging myself in the tidy caption-less digital photo album that is modern life. And I have no embarrassment in admitting it, because everyone else is also exactly like this (even Stephen Fry, and he is generally perceived as having some kind of personal identity), which is ironic, as the universality of it all juxtaposes with the narcissism that has emerged. We are so wrapped up in our wonderful selves that we are completely oblivious to the Orwellian lack of individualism and idiosyncrasy that is now so ingrained.

Just count how many times I have made use of the personal pronoun so far in this piece.

Sounds a little Brave New World, but think about it. Perhaps we have been immunised to the shedding of our personalities due to certain institutions such as Argos, where you are just another number, picking up a bathmat: the same bathmat that all the other numbers pick up. Or Yo! Sushi, where the dehumanising process is instilled by coerced consumption of produce out of plastic pods, which mechanically rotate around the sterile room, much like shrunken components of the London Eye, deconstructed to suit the distribution of Oriental raw foodstuffs. Seeing Westfield, the mother of all shopping centres, which could be mistaken for Terminal 5-cum-The British Museum, that has risen up in Shepherd’s Bush as suddenly and with as far reaching social consequences as a Tsunami made out of metal and money, this reduction of humans to mere cogs in a commercial infrastructure is clearer than anywhere else. Like Pacman chased by the ghosts (which, in this analogy, are mankind’s forever haunting desires for consumer goods - deep, eh?), they blip in straight lines to the cash-points, stocking up on energy, and then proceed to chomp their way systematically through every retail outlet available in this dystopian vision, eventually escalating up to the next levels. And this is in Shepherd’s Bush! Who wants to buy their Gucci there, over on Bond Street or in Sloane Square? You know it’ll only get nicked on the Tube home. But this lifestyle is fine because we are all so environmentally-conscious and live solely upon locally-sourced organic yak milk, carrying our Bags For Life ostentatiously through suburbia with pride.

But the fact that we are no longer individuals is actually not as horrific as sociologists and psychologists make out. It doesn’t matter because we have replaced individuality with idols to worship, whom, unlike God, we don’t tend to adore or even to envy. We can “love to hate” people, be grateful that we are not them, and continue to have a morbid fascination with them and their lives. Much like watching insect mating rituals on David Attenborough programmes, or Madonna in a leotard - it isn’t pretty, and to be honest it’s fairly disturbing, but you can’t for the life of you look away. Take poor sweet noble Jordan. We can only sympathise: not only must she probably have the breast-related trauma of the worst back-ache in the world, great difficulty lying on her stomach to read Ian McEwan on the beach and the quest to find non-steel-reinforced bras that fit, but she was also on the receiving end of a lot of bullying via reality TV. The British public, which was once so unassuming and would probably have refrained from anything more than an embarrassed glance at Katie Price in the jungle and then waited for Noel Coward to write a suitably witty song alluding to it in order to allow themselves a short, self-conscious chuckle at her expense, has voted for her to do seven “Bushtucker Trials” on I’m a Celebrity... She left the programme. Jordan willingly took herself out of the limelight! Such power. Look at David Cameron. As an ex-Etonian, ex-Oxonian, ex-Bullingdon Club member and current Tory leader, he doesn’t stand a chance against the cruelty of our press or public. People are quick to dismiss his floppy-haired, well-educated self as an out of touch toff. But how eager they are to know everything about his past, home life, and the psychoanalysis behind which side he parts his hair on. Our celebrities, and to an extent our politicians, are putty in our hands, and this is what makes the 21st century so much fun. We don’t have to be introspective and unique. We just have to watch glamour models eating koala testicle for our satisfaction.

As I write, I am being constantly disturbed by the ceaseless advertisements that litter my Spotify playlist what feels like every 30 seconds. For those of you still proudly organising your iTunes account, Spotify is a bittersweet installation which combines the generous provision of unlimited free music with the drawback of an equally as varied, though admittedly not as enjoyable, collection of sexual health and Nandos commercials that make you unplug your speakers with rage every three songs. Spotify giveth and Spotify taketh away. And this cheeky programme pauses the adverts if the sound is muted or even dipped below a certain level. You won’t miss a single golden piece of condom-related advice. So yes, the culture of Information Delivered Incessantly On Tap (IDIOT) that began with Google access on phones has even spread to the way people listen to their personal music collection. What a mighty century ours is that allows the interruption of a dedicated music lover’s listening experience of Mariah Carey’s extensive back-catalogue with an urgent plea for everyone to go out and try some Peri Peri Sauce. Some would say it is a hollow scheme of the consumer industry: I’d say it is a perk. Just like the old days of listening to the radio, but choosing the playlist oneself, therefore avoiding Chris Tarrant’s interesting musical favourites. Perhaps this is a natural progression, as music is not its own anymore. It is not tangible, as it once was with records, cassettes and CDs (and not forgetting the music industry car crash that was the minidisc...). We can no longer hold it, give it as a gift, shatter it into little pieces or leave it on a shelf to give the impression of a pop-savvy household. It is yet another part of life sucked into the infinite ether of the World Wide Web, along with newspapers, TV programmes and our thoughts. A further, particularly fascinating and glorious change in the music industry is its transcendence of class achieved by certain genres. Music snobbery is a thing of the past; our clothes, friendship circle and hair colour are no longer defined by our musical tastes. Anyone else aware of the public school reverent appreciation of Dubstep? The same dutty, dutty beatz are pulsed through an East London warehouse rave as will grace the dance floor of Boujis. Yah, wait for the drop, chaps.

The Age of Irony is upon us. And, ironically, I am not being ironic when I suggest that I enjoy ironically participating in the irony that pervades all. Perhaps everything we do, from eating our 5-a-day to watching The X Factor, is done out of irony; an activity to comment on wryly in our observational blogs and Twitter updates. We are so obsessed with who we are, that we have run out of aspects of ourselves to celebrate and are now only left with things to parody. And we like it. And we are all looking forward to living in a world controlled by Simon Cowell, The Daily Mail and recycling. Or maybe that’s just me. But it is all about me, after all.