"Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!"

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- Repetitive but soul-tingling sentiment sung in Handel's Messiah

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Last Saturday crossing the threshold of Sydney's Town Hall to attend a performance of Handel's very, very Christian Messiah, this atheist, your columnist, was half-expecting an unbeliever-detecting alarm to sound.

I was half-expecting that then a burly Church of England bouncer would collar me and then bounce me off the premises and out onto secular George Street.

Readers, did these, my worst fears, come shockingly, bruisingly true for me? All will be revealed, a few paragraphs hence.

The government has introduced its social media ban to try to prise under-16s away from the virtual worlds of their screens and to nudge them out into the real world of real people.

Even as this experiment unfolds, this oldie (I am 80) has become increasingly aware of his own unhealthily screen-hugging, stay-at-home habits. I am passionate about classical music but have got into the habit of revelling in the superabundance of it available on God's gift of YouTube.

Going to real, live performances of anything requires one to suffer the irritating and unhygienic necessity of mixing (horror!) and mingling (shudder!) with real, live people.

Home, alone in his study, the sensitive aesthete is safe from the vulgarities of the common throng.

And yet, to stay home like that is to be caught up in the terrible social-isolationist trends of what Derek Thompson has called the Anti-Social Century in his long-read essay of that name for The Atlantic.

Over many months Thompson spoke with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists and found that in societies like America's and ours,........

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