The social networking global village is as vibrant and humming with shared gossip as any real rural village in antiquity. Every morning, on my laptop, I hear on Facebook news, jokes and gossip being shared by a diverse group of people around the world, some of whom I have known for 50 years, others for a few days. I genuinely feel as if I'm in a real continuing, gossipy discourse with real friends.

Facebook-ing and Twitter-ing may have an image for some of being a still transient fad, vapid, even, but I suspect that the likes of Dr Johnson, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and even Karl Marx would have been avid Tweeters. We already know from within Twitter's first year that when major events occur, such as the 2009 repression in Iran, Tweeted gossip becomes far from idle: "Tyranny's new nightmare: Twitter" ran a Los Angeles Times headline during that unrest. 

The same will doubtless happen again and again elsewhere. In China, where Facebook and Twitter are banned, young people have built their own imitation, Kaixin, which they use for gossip and trivia — but also to swap anti-regime stories of official corruption, government malfeasance and anything else of which the official media might fight shy. 

Raw and National Enquirer-ish as some of its rumours seem, Kaixin seems unstoppable as a forum for China's young intelligentsia to foster a mild sense of rebellion and discontent. And no user pays a penny for it. 

Offline, a widespread sharing, voluntary ethic is also becoming manifest, and while this may be coincidental, the idea that it is happening in the slipstream of the cultural change wrought by the internet is compelling, since sharing — be it infrastructure, intellectual property, personal information or almost anything — hasn't exactly had the best of images since Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Mao opened for business. 

It isn't just that the old sharing had a goody-goody feel that started when you were forced to share sweets and toys. The command, share-or-go-without economies of Eastern Europe and elsewhere were a prime case of what was equated once by Kenneth Baker to "stroking the cat's fur the wrong way". Given the chance, people in those states rejected the uniformity and squalor of enforced sharing and gleefully adopted capitalism, individualism and private property. The remaining significant communist country, China, has nominally retained its branding, but entirely shed the enforced sharing ethic, and become the most vigorous and successful of market economies. In the West, such patchy attempts at promoting a more shared way of thinking as workers' co-operatives have all but died out. Even the tradition for idealistic Western students of spending time living the communal life on a kibbutz has faded to insignificance, along with the kibbutzim themselves.