It's a testament to the bewildering dichotomy of contemporary life that while the age of 40 is routinely described as the new 30, at exactly the same time 40 is becoming the new 70. How else to describe a generation of 40-year-olds who sound increasingly like their very own granddads did back in the 1970s?

This week Noel Gallagher, 41, speaks for a sizeable minority of his generation when describing the knee-jerk naysaying he always feels when confronted with the technological advancements of the increasingly digital age, in exactly the same way you heard the old folk talk, in the olden days, about the TV being the devil.

"Webcams!" he blared this week. "In the studio. Who wants to see the drummer walking around in his socks?

"There's too much information now. The internet to most people is the be-all and end-all of everything. I haven't got a computer. I've got this far in my life without a computer. Email? All the people I need to speak to are on the end of the phone.

"I understand that that little computer is the greatest invention probably of all humanity. But for the running of my day-to-day life? Bends my head. Get your food delivered, read the papers online, watch the telly, send your kids to school by email "

All of which makes Noel Gallagher, whether we like it not, likely to live to be 150, while the rest of us are now officially dying of clinically recognised internet-related stress. In the week Noel pipes his penn'orth for the good old days of the 20th century, a survey tells us we're now so addicted to the internet that we're behaving like proper drug addicts, experiencing extreme withdrawal reactions, panic and rises in blood pressure when we cannot have our hit.

The survey of 2100 Brits, carried out by YouGov for information service 118 118, tells us 76% of us "cannot live" without the internet, 87% rely on the net as their main source of information and 44% are frustrated and confused when cut off. "The proliferation of broadband," avers psychologist Dr David Lewis, "has meant that for the first time in history we have entered a culture of instant answers. A galaxy of information is just a mouse-click away and we have become addicted to the web.

"When unable to get online, discomgoogolation' takes over. It was surprising to see the stress this led to in brain activity and blood pressure." Over half of those quizzed said a broken broadband connection would be worse than if their homes were devoid of gas, water and electricity, while over in Canada people are even more insane, as news arrives of a woman whose response to the home-visiting IT technician who failed to fix her broadband was to attempt to hold him hostage until he fixed it and, according to Canada's Globe And Mail, imply she had a gun.

And for what, we wonder? For vital emails, perhaps, like these (newly arrived in the past two hours): a reminder from a chum over a forthcoming night out (I hadn't forgotten), a local property news update entitled How The Property Downturn Will Affect You (very badly), a spam missive entitled No More Failure In The Bedroom and the all-important musical news of the imminent return of bob-haired late-1980s jazz saps Swing Out Sister. For which information we'd be happy, evidently, to starve, freeze, drink rain water out of a drainpipe and threaten a stranger with a loaded firearm over.

The internet is, of course, as Gallagher observes, "the greatest invention probably of all humanity". For those of us forced to use it every day for work, it's an actual progressive miracle. In the world of the journalist, certainly, some of us can remember being trapped in an office at the mercy of the speed of the typing pool. But it is, simultaneously, a constant connection to no more than an infinite proliferation of piffling distraction and a global tsunami of blather.

So, in the week Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin went from complete unknown outside of Alaska to the subject of (at the last look) 17, 300,000 brand-new web pages to consult on the woman who makes Maggie Thatcher seem like the Dalai Lama, let's loosen, slightly, the self-affixed noose that strangles us and have what we'll call a Noel moment. A moment where we realise, ultimately, that if the whole global broadband network collapsed tomorrow, we would still get to know, by myriad means, what we actually need to know.

Otherwise, we can look forward to our 21st-century legacy so far: a generation in a mental asylum, discombobulated and discomgoogolated, with a middle-aged heart condition, the befuddled brain of a 95-year-old and the Botoxed face of a 23-year-old porn star.

Meanwhile, for Noel Gallagher, there's been some good news this week, and none more 21st-century: the buying of his beloved Manchester City football club by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, or as his buddies informed him while away on tour this week, "some Arab prince". Information that arrived overnight via "19 text messages". Noel has all the information he needs by all the means he needs, and will surely never be discomgoogolated. No wonder, indeed, he wrote a song called Live Forever.