What do the men and women who govern us do all day? They sit in front of their screens and gawp at Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and TripAdvisor. A list released last year of the websites most visited by British MPs reveals that what they get up to at work makes them no different to the rest of the population: they cyberloaf.

Even the young bankers who work such long hours that their employers have started banning them from coming to the office for the entire weekend seem to do more loafing than lending. At a recent conference I heard the heads of HR at two top investment banks complaining that data from these bankers’ computers show that less than half of their time in the office was spent on work. A study from Kansas State University backs this up: the average US worker spends 60-80 per cent of their time online at work doing things that are quite unrelated to their jobs.

David Ryan Polgar, a US pundit and lawyer, has come up with a metaphor to describe our new affliction. He says we are getting mentally obese: we binge on junk information, with the result that our brains become so sluggish they are good for nothing except more bingeing.