So don’t log in to The Social List. Why give a damn about your ranking, and why hand your social networking data over to marketers and big business to be aggregated, commodified, monetized?

Instead, watch Adam Curtis’ new documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. (On BBC 2 tonight at 9pm, or of course on iPlayer.) Although it sounds a little technophobic (“A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built”) I heard Curtis speaking about the show on Radio 6 yesterday, and he sounded both positive about the power and “wonder” of the internet as well as cynical about some of the higher-level effects, a “darker side” of networking of which the individual users are largely unaware.