Recently, a friend showed me her mobile phone, with a despairing sigh. The screen was a mosaic of photos of a goggle-eyed baby, taken from every conceivable angle, sometimes holding chirpy, handwritten messages. “It’s overwhelming my inbox!” she muttered, explaining that four months earlier she had become a grandmother to the infant, who lived in a different city. A decade ago, that would have meant she only saw the baby every month — say, over a holiday meal.

But not in 2015. In the past month, the doting parents have taken to dispatching baby photos to all their friends and family on a daily basis. And now — to her utter bewilderment — my friend has been asked to send text messages to the infant. The idea is that these “texts” can be posted online to show that the grandparents are constantly thinking about their new grandson, and thus enable the family to “connect”. “It’s crazy,” she giggled, explaining that she didn’t want to cause offence but could not quite bring herself to send texts to a four-month-old. “What do I do?”

It is a peculiarly 21st-century dilemma. As linguists and anthropologists know well, the way that human families define themselves and communicate with each other has changed numerous times over the millennia. But the past decade has produced a shift in the pattern of family communications that is more speedy and intense than anything seen before.