A number of times a day, I read something particularly banal, often followed by some highly critical, nit-picking comments by people who are, presumably, without fault, and leave feeling a little worse than I did before.

Where have I just been?

The internet, that’s where.

Every day, something happens on the internet that makes me say “the internet is becoming shit”.

And, I think, the reason for this is that pretty much every thing and everyone is now online. This means that we get all the cat and dog people now, with their cat and dog jokes. And pictures of cats and dogs wearing hats. Or wearing clothing designed for people, but scaled down to fit a cat or a dog. Or a picture – or video – of a cat or a dog, with a caption that says what the cat or dog would have said were it not a stupid, thoughtless, speechless, pet.

And those pictures of cats that “can haz” things will become more popular than you ever thought real, until, one day, they are surpassed in terms of popularity only by a slightly unnerving Canadian child with a high voice and the sleekest hair imaginable singing tepid pop for the masses.

And that, my friends, is just about precisely the time when the internet went from being “rocking” and “awesome” to “shit”.