“Why are you annoyed?” shouts my wife. She cannot even see me. This isn’t, however, some marital sixth sense that alerts her to my state of mind. She has just read it on Twitter.

My wife has little truck with Twitter, perhaps thinking it is a vacuous space of people electronically throwing nonsense at other people they do not know. This is precisely its attraction for me. Four hundred years ago, I would have been the man wearing a hessian sack, flinging handfuls of dung at passers-by and asking them where the fish live.

Twitter is just one pimple on the ever-expanding pubescent mess that is the internet. And I say “pubescent mess” in the nicest possible way – the internet is a relatively young thing, still finding its way in the world, and can be full of sulkiness and raging hormones, and unexpected pearls of wisdom.

My children have grown up with the internet and can find a picture of a cat that looks like Hitler quicker than I can remember my password for my e-mails, and it makes me feel very, very old when I have to tell them that not only was the internet not around when I was a child, but neither were DVDs, CDs, ITV+1, Simon Cowell or Jessie J.

Anyone wanting to put the whole internet thing in some kind of context – and, let’s face it, who hasn’t woken up in the middle of the night at least once in a cold sweat, wondering to themselves “just what is the difference between the worldwide web and the internet? And why are there so many cats that look like Hitler on there?" – might want to mosey on over to the National Media Museum.

Rewind to yesterday morning, and I am having a tour around the new Life Online gallery, which is devoted to the internet. It very nicely puts the whole of the internet into a couple of rooms, hitting parents where it hurts by showing their small children things like board games, Super 8 projectors, and vinyl records and laughing at them: Ha ha, this is what old people had to do before Angry Birds/YouTube/iTunes!

People today really have never had it so good when it comes to having stuff at their fingertips. Why, some of you might even be reading this on the internet!

The Life Online gallery is a fascinating journey from the origins of the internet (bald Americans wondering what happens if you plug some computers together) to questions about its future – can it really expand forever? What happens if it gets full up? And what if they suddenly start making us pay for it?

Not only that, I learned the difference between the internet and the web. But it looks like I’ve run out of space, so I’ll have to tweet it. You can find me at @BarnettBradford.