Diary – 20 January 2007

If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their ‘Person of the Year’ last month, it got us all thinking about the nature of ‘power’ in the modern technological age. In pre-internet days, power was fairly easily definable. Politicians and newspaper proprietors essentially ran the country, because they decided how we led our lives, how we got our news, and how we thought. But the emergence of the world wide web has changed everything.  I recently interviewed Gordon Brown for a forthcoming GQ ‘power’ issue, and he was fascinatingly honest about the erosion of political influence under this cyperspace onslaught. ‘I think that the level of influence the state has on society now is far less than it used to be,’ he conceded. ‘The internet is so powerful, everyone is blogging, commercial advertising is moving online.