Just when I thought the golden age of social media nonsense had passed, along comes Stephen Harper. It’s agenda time in Ottawa. Parliament has returned from that winter break we all heard so much about, and now it’s the season of budgets and throne speeches and responses to throne speeches and whatever it is they [...]

The first thing to know about Chatroulette – the latest gonzo fixation to sweep the Web – is that it’s not safe for work. It’s not safe for children; it’s not safe for the squeamish; it’s not safe for any purpose. It contains people.

Everybody wants to know what this new Apple iPad means. Is it the salvation of the media? The end of the personal computer? Is it merely the most uncomfortable product name in recent memory? I’m sympathetic to the head-scratching, so I’ll tell you what the iPad means: The iPad means that, within a couple of months, there will be no physical position in which we won’t be able piss away time on the Internet.

Before Google’s recent swagger into geopolitics, another, smaller story had caught the attention of the Internet’s commentariat. A feature called Google Suggest appeared to be self-censoring results that would have disparaged Islam – and Google found itself accused of cowardice. If ever you needed an illustration of the bind Google has worked its way into, here it be.

Coming to the end of a long and curious decade, we could talk about so many of the things it’s wrought. We could talk of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, of the all-seeing eye of Google or the all-beguiling iPhone. But I want to talk about Gary Brolsma instead. Because if you want to tell the story of what happened in the oughts, look at the boy who danced the Numa Numa.

Facebook is changing. Last week, users logging in to the site were met with a little box that asked them to take a look at their privacy settings. After much discussion and a go-round with the Canadian government, the service has completely reworked its all-important system for determining who sees what. It’s a sea change for a company that built itself on the premise of providing a private space for friends. Believe it or not, it may be the best thing that could have happened.

It’s easy to sneer at coffee shops. This country properly belongs to Tim Hortons, after all, which is really more of a fast-food joint in drag. Coffee shops are urban inventions: game reserves for students, layabouts, guitarists and wearers of thick-framed glasses whose primary concern at this time of year is keeping their scarves out of their lattes. If that earns the scorn of middle Canada, I hear you.

But something is afoot here: The web is teaching us to do something that decades of suburbanization and fetishizing privacy made us forget: how to live in public.

There is, without a shadow of a doubt, something profoundly disconcerting about FourSquare. It’s not even the Web service’s fault; it’s a perfectly nice piece of software. It’s more what it does – encourage users to pinpoint themselves on a map, in real time, as often as they can. It’s like Twitter, but for locations. Instead of asking the question, “What are you thinking?” FourSquare asks, “Where are you right now?” It uses your smart phone’s GPS locator to answer – and then it tells all your friends. Why? Because it’s 2009, and that’s the kind of thing we do nowadays.

iPhones on the beach, and other uses for silicon implants