I came home to Moscow this month to discover I can suddenly pick up Wi-Fi in my flat. Various providers, like Stream and Golden Telecom, have been promising to make the whole of Moscow one big free Wi-Fi hotspot. Imagine – free information across the whole of Moscow! Dzerzhinsky must be turning in his grave.

Actually the network I can pick up seems to belong to a neighbour. That’s right, I’m having adultery with my neighbour’s Wi-Fi. We have something very special together. He must never find out.

What Wi-Fi has meant for me is that suddenly the internet is not just something I use at work, and occasionally outside of it to check emails. It has revolutionized my life.

I used to be part of the TV age, an age that has existed for half a century. In that age, we came home from work, and slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, and watched whatever was on, no matter how bad, simply because the pictures moved and we didn’t have to think.

In my case, Russian TV was so annoying, not to mention incomprehensible, that I ended up buying lots of rubbish pirate DVD movies. I own hundreds of them. I own Back To The Future 2.

How much time we wasted in the TV age! How little knowledge we gathered, how passive we were!

Now, according to Bill Gates, young westerners spend more leisure time on their laptops than they do watching TV. We are the digital generation.

We still watch TV or movies, of course. But we do so through the internet, which means we can find exactly the programmes and films we want instantly, and watch them for free. That’s what I did last night – I felt the urge to watch Ugly Betty, which is this hit TV series in America, based on the same Latin American telenovela which inspired ‘Ne rodis’ kracivoi’.

So I went to this website –www.peekvid.com - and found every episode of the series, ready to watch immediately, plus hundreds of other films and TV serials. OK, so the Digital Age still involves me sitting on my posterior watching trashy TV, but the point is, I choose what trashy TV I watch, and when!

Having Wi-Fi has also revolutionized how I communicate with my friends. They’re scattered all over the world – London, Paris, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires. We used to communicate by the occasional email, or the even more occasional phone call. Now, my friends have finally convinced me to join Skype.

Skype, as you perhaps know, is an amazing communication system that lets users speak through the internet for free. The sound quality is actually a lot better than a phone line. And you can actually see each other as well! My MacBook has a built in camera and microphone, so my mates can see my ugly mug grinning at them. You remember how sci-fi films would feature futuristic video-phones? Well, it seems the future is here.

What’s remarkable about Skype is the software is free to download. And that’s true of a whole lot of software on the internet. For example, you could shell out $100 for Norton’s anti-virus software, but you could just as easily download AVG’s free anti-virus software, which is apparently better.

The Digital Age has also transformed the media, and how we inter-act with it. Time magazine’s person of the year, for example, was ‘You’. The magazine was paying tribute to citizen journalism, to the millions of blog sites like My-Space or Blogspot, or shared photo networks like Flickr, or amateur video networks like YouTube, and how they have revolutionized how we interact with the media.

I think one of the coolest aspects of the new media are podcasts. These are mini-radio shows you can make using programmes like www.ableton.com, and then post on the net on special podcast servers such as www.libsyn.com. People can subscribe to your podcast so that the latest instalment instantly downloads into their ITunes when they’re on line.

My Mac has a new programme on it called IWeb, which allows you to build your own website with remarkable ease, including building a blog, a podcast, a photo page and so on. I’m going to launch my site in the next couple of weeks, probably calling it www.julesevans.org, and will put up photos from my journalistic travels, interviews with various politicians, and a fortnightly podcast. Well, that’s the plan anyway, if I stop watching Ugly Betty.

What are the long-term consequences of this digital age? Are there any, or is it just gadgetry for gadgetry’s sake?

It’s clear that we are spending more and more time on the internet, and importantly, more and more of our leisure time. And I think this is a good thing, that we are becoming empowered by it. We can communicate more easily; find what we want to watch, read or listen to more easily; develop our tastes and expand our knowledge.

It encourages us to be creative, to observe, record, comment. We are the stars of the Digital Age, whether it be some blogger in Baghdad, two Chinese students lip-synching to the Backstreet Boys, or the tourist who happened to record the tsunami on his digital camera, and whose images of the waves crashing through his hotel went round the world. We make the TV shows, the music, the documentaries, the editorial. If the corporate market doesn’t understand or approve or what we’re doing, we put it out anyway, let people decide for themselves.

Analysts like Moses Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, are already talking about how we now live in a YouTube era, when the misdeeds of governments are instantly visible. He gives the example in the latest issue of Foreign Policy of an incident when Chinese border guards shot and killed a group of Tibetan refugees in cold blood. The Chinese government claimed they had been fired on first, but a European mountaineer who happened to be in the vicinity filmed the incident on his mobile and put it on YouTube. The truth came out.

To speculate into the future, it may also be that the Digital Age will enable global civilization to remain connected and joined up, even if climate change forces us to reduce drastically the amount we travel by plane. Video conferencing will become sufficiently powerful that we don’t need to travel hundreds of miles for a meeting or two, as some of my friends do today.

At the same time, there is the challenge of filtering out the flood of information. Sure, everyone is making blogs and podcasts, but is anyone reading them? We depend, I suppose, on word of mouth as much as we ever did, to find out where to go on the net.

I am certainly not one of these internet idealists who believe the new transparency, connectedness and speed of information of the world will suddenly lift us to a new level of consciousness. A quarter of all internet searches are pornographic. The most popular internet search is still Britney Spears. In other words, human consciousness remains the same old 0.1 model, and doesn’t look like getting an upgrade anytime soon.

But I still love my Wi-Fi, or my neighbour’s Wi-Fi. Thanks neighbour.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

January 19, 2007