Some of these were clearly in very poor taste, like the one about the six paparazzi who died in a Paris tunnel trying to escape from Dannii Minogue. Dannii has to work bloody hard to get all those magazine covers without actually having any career to speak of. It's a huge effort and she deserves more goddamn respect. Some of the other Diana jokes were little better, for instance: what's Diana getting for Christmas? The Queen Mother.

The flood of these jokes via email was clearly as big a media phenomenon as Diana's funeral. At the height of it I was getting twenty to thirty of these quips a day. Yet on TV there was a ghostly silence. No Princess Di jokes whatsoever. Instead we got all those retrospectives on Diana's life, with slo-mo, vaselined images, assembled for a tearful public who cried on the way children do when they hug their favorite puppy to death.

And then there was the painful voice-over commentary during the funeral. Measuring every word so carefully, the commentators stumbled through each tortured sentence, desperate not to say anything that could be construed as offensive or disrespectful. You could well imagine the beads of swear forming on their brows as the mental gears of self censorship worked in opposition to the need to keep talking. It was like an exercise in bomb disposal. "Careful chaps, one accidental double entendre and the whole bloody thing will blow up in our faces!"

Later it was revealed that a TV presenter from a small network in the south west of England was sacked because of comments he made while one of those soft focus retrospectives was playing. Thinking her was off-mike, he made some crude and vulgar observations about the size of Diana's "knockers" to get a laugh out of the studio crew. It went on air and the doofus was sacked on the spot. He was lucky his severed head wasn't impaled on a spike outside the city limits by an outraged populace. Yet the emailed Diana jokes that I received (and passed on) were vastly more obscene than this idiot's offence and were passed around without objection.

On TV people are expected to be on their best behavior. But online, you hear the disrespectful filth that's really going on in everyone's minds and in day to day conversations. For better or worse.

The last email I received on Princess Diana revealed that a Volvo dealer in Macau lost his franchise after running an ad with the image of Diana and the tagline, "She'd still be alive if she was in a Volvo." Which just goes to show that even in Macau, Volvo owners are smarmy bastards.

If only the dealer had put the ad online instead of on TV, he might still be in business today.

Your average doofus on TV has a small army of producers, makeup artists, wardrobe specialists, wet nurses and toilet trainers to make sure that the said doofus is presented in the best possible light (although no matter how hip Daryl Somer's designer clothes are, it still looks like he picked it up from the specials bin at Target). These experts are employed to lend an air of dubious authority to the overpaid ponce who's reading from the autocue. Although the ponce may well seem charming and completely together, minutes ago he was probably having a tanty in his dressing room because someone forgot to dab some wasabe on his sushi.

If Kerri-Anne Kennerly created a personal Web site on her own, what would it look like? How about Bert Newton? The very concept boggles the mind. One can only certain it would be very beige and have a lot of links to hair care products. Our political leaders are surrounded with a similar coterie of advisors to filter their self-presentation. Just imagine what our beloved Prime Minister's Web site would look like if he were left to do it entirely off his own bat: it wouldn't be the slick, wood paneled version at http://www.pm.gov.au. John Howard is a pretty astute bloke who could pick up a bit of HTML for fun while on his holidays. Toss in some Photoshop skills and he's be off and away.

For a start you'd have the homepage with the picture of himself, looking relaxed and comfortable in an open necked Pelaco shirt with some faintly visible sweat stains around the armpits, sporting that sexy, devilish grin we've come to know and love. The font would be Times, of course: classy, but not too wild, and you'd have spooky banner ads for products from the 1950s that don't actually exist anymore: Tarax softdrinks, EH Holdens and Guest's Butternut Snaps.

The beauty of democratic media like the Web is that average slobs can put a site together all by themselves, allowing them to make all kinds of 'uninformed' choices about design and self presentation so that we can see them in all their savage unfiltered dagginess.

There are degrees of exhibitionism on a homepage of course. A personal touch can be revealed simply by the wacky font that someone stuck on the bevel edged, drop shadowed button that leads you to their fave pictures of Lorenzo Lamas.

Others go further by posting their diaries or snaps of themselves kissing their domestic pets. But special mention must be given to the real risk takers: the champions who are compelled to expose their naked splendor on their own Web site.

These brave home blokes and home girls who deserve nothing but respect and admiration from a grateful public. Many of these sites are clearly a labour of love from some anonymous soul determined to be recognised as the exquisite, fascinating things that they know they truly are.

Looking at some of the sites, you marvel at these people who by day work as dental receptionists, cab drivers or young mums. It's like they hold a huge secret that they've just got to share. The secret is, to their minds, themselves. Their 'specialness' is blindingly obvious to them. They feel they should, by all rights, be major stars and it's a crime that they've been overlooked all these years. And they're absolutely right.

And John Howard should make his own nude Web site now! What has he got to hide? Be proud! Do it now, John! For all of us!

But what about entertainment? There seem to be real problems just in getting the people who usually create content in other media to sit down and work with the geeks who hold the secret of fire: the tech and programming skills that digital media is so utterly beholden to.

It's in the mega entertainment Web sites that the clash between culture and geekdom is fiercest. The groovers in smart clothing brought in to provide 'content' quickly find themselves at war with the geek lifers with stock options from the software company that’s paying for the whole site. The geeks see the hipsters as filthy heretics, café latte drinking wankers that dare to have a life outside the software company. It’s like watching a group of jazz ballet dancers going to work for the Scientologists.

The geeks twitch uneasily in their cubicles as the hipsters come into the office; they fondly remember the good old days of DOS when computers were completely baffling and geekspeak was unquestioned. As for the hipsters… well, many have reached the end of the line in that tragic career trajectory of actor to waiter to Web designer. The hipsters are slumming it. In spite of what they say publicly about the challenge of making interactive entertainment, they'd rather be making films and hot-tubbing in L.A. with the cast of 'Friends'.

Amongst the squabbling geeks and groovers are the bull artists brought in from the advertising industry: usually British private school kids with fake cockney accents and a spiritual outlook picked up from a Fruitopia bottle they found at a rave party (one planet, one mind, one spirit etc etc).

These brats have talked their way into their jobs. First chance they get, they'll pummel you with their Internet brave new world schtick: we're rebuilding the metaphor, it's a major paradigm shift, the television thing is dead and now we're lifting the benchmark, this is the way the Internet was always meant to be, it's like drinking from a fire hydrant, baby, it's bigger than everything. Yeah, but what do you actually do, Jeremy?

If the techno geeks are suspicious of the hipster creatives, they completely despise the Fruitopia brats and snigger when these clueless hype artists refer to HTML as DHL or HML (as in "I'm planning to learn some DHL myself so I can make my own personal Web site"). They recount these stories through email and snigger in their cubicles at each gaffe.

Suddenly, someone at the software company who's supposedly supervising the whole mess gets hit by a nasty case of Channel Syndrome. He runs into the room in a sweaty panic and screams "The sponsors are pulling out! It's not working! Change everything! And by the way, everyone's fired!"

He trips over a printer cable and a massive laser printer in yanked off the shelf, killing him instantly. The groovers shrug their shoulders. Now they can go back to what they love best: hanging around in cafés complaining about the Liberal government. The Fruitopia brats are shattered. Perhaps they really should have learned some HLM so at least they'd have a marketable skill. One looks down and screams in horror: her tamagotchi has just karked it. The geek tech heads shake their heads in disgust and mutter darkly: you can't even trust them with digital pets, for christ's sake.

But I'd still rather buy my books from a bookshop, because most of the time I have no idea what it is I am going to buy when I go there.

Oh no. I don't want online bookshops anywhere near as much as an online supermarket. I would rather chew broken glass than go to the supermarket. From the moment I push through the creaking turnstile I'm overcome with a profound emotion that can only be described as intense loathing for my fellow human beings. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not normally misanthropic, but there's something about supermarkets and airport departure lounges that makes me want to go postal*.

When I'm in a supermarket I'm not myself. I start to consider voting for the National Party. I begin to believe that everyone in the entire country should be either put in the army, or just put into prison immediately and have done with it. Everyone, that is, except for me, my friends and anyone who is like me, except a little worse at everything.

It's not any one thing that bothers me about supermarket shopping, it's the total experience.

It's the concentration camp lighting, with the flickering, buzzing fluoros.

It's the shopper with the flu that has a big, watery sneeze all over the fruit and veg section.

It's the muzak version of 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' warbling through the speakers.

It's the fact that I can never find that damn packet of CCs that I need with Maggie Simpson on it.

And it's the shattering voice that booms out

"BREAKAGE IN AISLE SIX, BREAKAGE IN AISLE SIX."

I've always wanted to be able to somehow jack into the speaker system of a supermarket and read out poetry in a deafening, nasal tone. Who knows what effect it would have on the shoppers to hear "THE WOODS ARE LOVELY, DARK AND DEEP" instead of "NARELLE, COME TO THE CHECKOUTS…?" It could be even more fun to quietly read out subliminal instructions to the shoppers like "…steal the pork cutlets… no one will know…" or better still "…kill mummy and daddy…"

Online supermarkets will work by going to the Web site, checking out the specials, selecting your brand of cornflakes, detergent and toothpaste and getting them delivered to your door by a pubescent geek with a pencil behind his ear. Thereby cutting out the middle folk and eliminating the need to go to those hell-holes of human misery.

A virtual supermarket will make us all better human beings.

* Totally stressed out and losing it. Like postal employees who go on shooting rampages (courtesy of Wired Jargonwatch).