Last Wednesday afternoon, 11-year-old Patrick Young was walking up Grange Road in Rathfarnham with his friends discussing that day's St Mary's Boys National School Gaelic football league quarter-final game.
Pulling his newly acquired mobile phone from his pocket, Patrick decided to text his former team-mate, Stephen, with the result of the crucial match. He punched in the score, pressed the send button, and seconds later my son, 7,000 miles away in Beijing, was up-to-date on the latest news from his old school.
On the same day, I did an interview for RTE Radio One from the top of Mount Wutai in Shanxi Province in central China using my mobile phone. The connection was so clear I could have been on my landline in Beijing for all the listeners knew.
In the early hours of Thursday, my husband's mobile beeped, alerting him to the fact he had a text. It was Jack, in a Dublin pub, informing him that the Republic of Ireland soccer team had beaten Andorra 3-1 in the World Cup qualifier.
My daughter, Catherine, is keeping in touch with her friend Vicky by e-mail and mobile texting. My sister-in-law, Ann, texts me daily with family news. And all for a few pence a go.
Irish tourists visiting Beijing recently brought me copies of The Irish Times. But the reality is that I have The Irish Times read on the Internet before you, dear readers, are up in the mornings.
Any concerns I had when I moved to China last January about losing contact with family, friends and colleagues have proven unfounded. Thanks to the wonders of mobile phone texting, e-mails, and the Internet, I probably know more about what's going on at home than when I was in Ireland.
The communications revolution has truly made it a small world, and China is embracing developments with enthusiasm.
There are now more than 22.5 million web-surfers in China, up from a mere handful when the Internet was first allowed here in 1995.
Today, the number of websites in the country tops 30,000. At its current rate of growth, it is predicted that China will have the world's biggest online population within three years.
As for mobile phones, they are everywhere. The number of users doubled last year to 85 million, making China the world's second-largest mobile phone market after the US.
Texting, or duan xiao xi as it is known here, is a huge draw for mobile phone customers. More than 120 messages a second were sent at the peak of this year's Spring Festival holiday in January.
Mobile phones and the Internet are rapidly opening China to the outside world and posing huge problems for the Communist Party, which is trying to curb the unprecedented flow of information.
According to a senior editor at the popular Chinese site, Sina.net, the Internet is having a very strong impact on society.
"In the 1970s it could take months for people to receive news of something big happening. Now, people know what is happening within hours."
Even more worrying for the authorities is the use of the Internet to express independent political opinions.
"The atmosphere on the Internet is far more free than the atmosphere in our country generally", according to one student at Beijing University. "When you are in front of a computer no one can control your soul or your spirit."
With students and members of the public barred from gathering for unofficial demonstrations, the Internet is playing a role in sparking small-scale protests.
Shortly before the 11th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last June, a female Beijing University student was killed in a criminal assault. Because of the sensitive anniversary, university officials refused to let students hold a funeral gathering on campus.
Instead, students organised an online memorial using the university's electronic bulletin board service. More than 1,000 people logged on to pay tribute to their classmate and to call for better campus security.
All Internet services in China are funnelled through government servers, whose administrators block access to certain Western news sites, Chinese dissident web pages, Taiwanese newspapers, and other material deemed objectionable.
But despite the efforts of the authorities, the regulation of the Internet is still sporadic and disorganised.
This week, a major feature on the detention of US-born Chinese scholars was physically cut out of all editions of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
The censors also ripped an article on China's relations with the Vatican out of editions of the Economist before copies reached the newsstands. But I was able to read both features on the Internet.
So it appears the information revolution is one that the Communist leaders are finding hard to quell.
Excuse me now. I have a back up of e-mails and text messages to reply to. And there are important Internet sites I must log onto for research purposes. Oh, and if you want to join the global information revolution, my e-mail is: miriamd@163bj.com.