The year 2000, you will recall, was going to be the year when humanity was digitalised. The experts told us to invest all our hopes and dreams in the e-revolution. As experts tend to be, they could not have been proved more wrong.

While those cutting-edge Americans wasted billions of dollars inoculating their computers against the millennium bug which never bit, the humanly shambolic Italians didn't do a thing and were in the money. Predictions of the perils of new technology did not come true, and neither did the forecasts that it would take over the world. Boom.com turned into Bust.com. Only a minuscule proportion of shopping this Christmas has been done on-line.

As they always have, the high streets and department stores heave with herds of gift hunter-gatherers. Could it be that people actually enjoy each other's company? This season's hot toy is not a games console - it is Tracey Island, headquarters of the 30-year-old Thunderbirds family who, even in their remastered form, show their puppet strings attached. FAB. Many families will spend Boxing Day gathered around the old-fangled wireless and tune into the Home Service's day-long broadcast of Harry Potter, a charmingly timeless tale of boy heroes and wizardry.

The Observer has never been a Luddite, technophobic newspaper. That doesn't prevent us celebrating the consternation of the ambitions of those who would chop us into atomised digital chunks, hard-wired to terminals and Wap phones, removed from fleshy contact with each other. Technology has an important place in most people's lives, but it is never going to be a substitute for having a life. Indeed, as we report today, new research suggests that one of the most reliable ways to extend your life is to spend this season in the company of friends and loved ones.

We wish a merry Christmas to all The Observer 's readers. More than that, we wish you a warmly human Christmas, too.