Ellie tells me that close to finals she found it particularly useful to download from iTunes (free) online lectures from experts in her subject from other universities, from Oxford and Cambridge to Harvard and Princeton. She also tells me about a new band she loves and suggests I listen to their music on the (free) legal music website Spotify. I leave for London after checking the train times from Brighton on another (free) app that relays the departures schedule live from every station on the rail network. We agree we will have a (free) Skype video chat at the weekend. 

Walking to the station, I dictate some emails to a (free) app called Dragon Dictation, which takes my words, transcribes them on a computer sited in Boston, Mass, and, a few seconds later, delivers them faultlessly typed and ready to send from my phone. On the train, I also dictate and post a (free) Qype review of the restaurant at which we ate. 

Now while consuming all these free services is what might modishly be called "a no-brainer", writing a restaurant review for no money should be counterintuitive, at least to me, a professional writer who has no income stream other than getting paid for my views and expressing them. But we appreciated Qype's recommendation, loved the restaurant, and I was more than happy to contribute comments to the site — to the Qype "community" if you must — for no payment. It's not even a matter of showing off your critical skill, gastronomic knowledge or whatever — the reviews on Qype are anonymous. The driver is pretty well entirely altruistic. It's a sharing thing. 

And, inspired by the example of the internet, with its much-discussed "economics of free", but extending into the non-digital world too, the idea of sharing in all its guises has never been more popular. The new sharing is, one hastens to add, in no more than the remotest sense socialistic in motivation. There is not even the faintest whiff of stale Marxist cant about it. It is more like the kind of sharing your nanny would have encouraged — sharing because it's sensible, efficient and character-building. 

The new sharers, both those who provide free services and consume them, seem to me to be overwhelmingly Thatcher-generation free-marketeers, opportunists and either would-be or active entrepreneurs. From my experience, I don't think any of them would find a commune or a kibbutz appealing. The new sharing is business-friendly. It just sees sharing as a sensible, efficient way to live which by way of clever background manipulation (I am thinking here of the way free-to-user Google manages to make a fortune on the quiet), can also provide a healthy living to a lot of people. 

The new sharing is at root an internet phenomenon. Online, we share infrastructure in free-to-user "Cloud computing" applications from webmail to Google Documents to YouTube, Flickr (free photography sharing) and Evoca (free audio online recording and sharing) and business utilities like Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Baidu and Alibaba. We share intellectual property through sites such as Wikipedia, through the free university lectures my daughter used and via organisations such as Creative Commons that enable people to share and build on the intellectual work of others, while still respecting copyright. And we share personal information on social networking sites, to the point where the electronic "global village" envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s has actually come about, albeit via the internet, which had still to be invented when McLuhan was writing.