It is the narcissistic middle-aged, not the young, who love Facebook and Twitter

John Rowe

Cue irate comments from spinsters defending Lord Fry of Luvviedom and suggesting you are jealous.

Barry

These twits are assuming that their ramblings must be sophisticated because the medium is modern and technologically sophisticated. If the same words were exchanged by letter or even email, their absurdity would be clear - even to them.

Yvonne

Thank God that as I was born before 1955 I don't have to get involved with these e-stuff time wasters.

Big Alec

In all fairness, it seems to me that facebook and Bebo attract people of all ages and backgrounds (young/old, rich/poor), whereas Twitter, as far as I can tell, is used predominantly by self-obsessed 30-something a*seholes who work in the media and advertising.

A. MacAulay

Right, then please pass the message on at your next editorial meeting that the Spectator is no venue for these twitchy, twatty, twerpy tonks. Fry, Isley, etc. Please.

Iryna

I'm 19, not on Facebook and proud of it. But I do not know any one else of my age and of the same opinion.

Peter

Spot on Rod (as usual). If, as they say, you'd like some further reading on this subject then do get hold of my book Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain (available at all good SAU outlets).

Austin Barry

Fry is preposterous - a kind of ersatz Oscar Wilde without the genius but with the prison record - and his banal twitterings surely suggest some form of cyberspace Tourette's syndrome. Still, I look forward to his deathbed twit, "Darlings, Stephen is off to the Elysian Fields in search of angelic Ganymedes, love and homage to Emma, Rod Liddle can go.." (It is 23 words only, isn't it?)

ian skidmore

CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN THE UBIQUITY OF FRY.HE PARADES HIS PROCLIVITIES,HE EITHER CAN'T OR DOESN'T ACT, HE JUST OFFERS HIMSELF.HE WROTE A FINE BOOK ON THE APPRECIATION OF POETRY AND SEVERAL BAD ONES AND RUINED AN EDITION OF HAVEN'T A CLUE.HE WILL ANSWER ANY QUESTION WHETHER IT IS ASKED OR NOT. HE HAS THAT MOST DANGEROUS OF GIFTS A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY WHICH HE SHARES WIH A MIND GRINDING GENEROSITY AND A WHOLLY JUSTIFIED BIPOLARITY

N

I was born in 1986, am i just outside of the "epic sense of self generation"?

Rob Allen

This article by Mr Liddle is brilliant, a precise bullet aimed at things that are depressing about 21st century life. very cathartic to read such a peice that resonates with me regarding things that just make me cringe, ie; Twittering twits, Celebrities esp the Luvvies like Stephen Fry and the idiots who lap it up. Thanks Rod, I needed that.

Beset by Rats

I use facebook because my little brother and his wife post their photo's on it. They live in Hong Kong and the rest of us can see what they're up to and reciprocate. Other than that; the whole collecting "friends" you've met/slept with once etc, its a bunch of pants.

I was amused by Fry until he pulled the "who hasn't fiddled expenses?" rubbish during an interview. Well I haven't and (youthful stupidity aside) don't condone public figures doing it. Especially when the rest of us are skint and STILL paying for the fiddling.

Dave

I fit the profile; born before '55 and can't see the point of FaceBook, Twitter and so on.
Thing is, another thing I don't understand is why Liddle increasingly uses his weekly column to bludgeon harmless entities such as Fry. I mean, yes Fry can be a bit over present but he has produced some amusement on page and screen that has pleasured many. I'm sure that Liddle used to rely on wit and writing skill more than of late; these days he's just plain nasty. Was it the pasting he received from the readership of The Word?

Andrew

Rod, you've clearly never looked at Twitter for more than five seconds, as your embarrassingly ignorant answers on Radio 4's 'Any Questions' made clear. Celebrity narcissism makes up about 0.000001% of its traffic. The rest is an interesting and concise exchange of views, ideas, news and opinion – like any other form of mass media, but more democratic. As for those people who tweet about their lunch and shoes, one simply decides not to follow them. It's wonderful, you really should try it, but then you wouldn't be able to toss off comically ill-informed ad hominem attacks on an entire swathe of popular media like this. Keep up the good work!

pickwick

Twitter is a medium, and is no more inherently inane or bad than any other medium - for example, newspaper columns. It's what you do with it that counts. And what people do is chat. Unless every conversation you have with anyone is full of bon mots and deep thoughts, it's a bit hypocritical to complain about other people's...

Lawrence

A pointless, bitchy bit of text. Move on.

Darren Stephens

@Dave "Was it the pasting he received from the readership of The Word?"

No, that just came about as the result of his comedically garganytuan reservoir of vitriol. Plus, it's fun to see someone so vicious be so spectacularly thin-skinned.

As for twitter article.

a) I know lots of people in their early 20's who do use it (but then I work in a university deprtment with web and media literate students)

b) I'm sure there are quite a few people in Tehran right no who would like to diagree with him

Hey ho.

Lee Rimmer

Knocking Twitter based on looking at a few celebrity examples is like knocking all print media based on a quick look at Nuts and Heat magazine. If only Mr Liddle restrained himself to 140 characters in his pieces, he would appear less ill-informed.

Andrew

Pickwick is spot on. There are millions of Twitter users, and millions more inane and pointless messages. But there are also hugely funny people and long, evolving hugely funny and enjoyable conversations. To pretend that as a medium it's redundant because of some messages you've found is as ignorant as pronouncing the telephone redundant because some of its users make tedious phone calls.

Andrew

PS as far as narcissim goes, if sending messages online to people you know is narcissistic, publishing your unremarkable opinions in magazines and newspapers is infinitely more so.

rod liddle

Andrew - so what, then, is publishing an opinion about said narcissitic activity upon a blog site.

The Word - third rate journalism for middle aged public school kidults, people who never quite got that overrated but often exciting medium, rock music.

Point about Iran, incidentally, taken. A good call and I should have mentioned it. But Tehran ain't here, and Stephen Fry is even less compelling than Mr Musavi.

David Short

Not a very good Liddle this week.

No one who is sane likes Fry.

Fry has 'earned' lots of money.

More than any jobbing journalist could hope to make in perhaps five hundred years.

That's why Fry will look down his long, ugly nose at this attack.

(I particularly dislike him doing ads when he doesn't need the money because he doesn't have children. He does them with Paul Merton, who does have a family, but surely the loadsamoney he gets from HIGNFY should be enough).

Tim

You claim that Facebook "is now overwhelmingly populated by the relentlessly jabbering middle-aged, importuning one another to be their friends. Bob has asked you to be his friend! Will you be his friend? Please!"

I'd like to see a citation for this. It seems wrong -- I use Facebook mostly for sharing photos -- and the numbers I found don't support it.

At 6.6B friend requests in 2008 for 140M users, that's 47 each. But over 1B photos uploaded per *month*, or 86 each. Either by time or by number, photo sharing dominates on Facebook.

Friend requests are how you see somebody's photos, but it's just their website's terminology. (When I fill out a form on the web, it doesn't mean I'm "Submit"ting myself to something, either.) I've seen more relentless jabbering about friends in this article than I've ever seen on Facebook.

Not Even Likely

It seems like keeping Twitter updated is only possible for people who have a lot of spare time (or personal assistants). I can't spend that much frigging time at such a ridiculous thing. Even I don't care what I ate for breakfast. I certainly would have a lot of tweets that said - "I went to work. I came home. I made dinner. We ate it. I talked with my family. I/we did/didn't watch television. I did/didn't read a book. I went to bed." "Ditto." "Ditto." "Ditto." And, occasionally, "I visited my mother today!"

I foresee that Twitter will devolve into a sort of fan site for celebrities and public figures as a way for them to communicate with their fans. Also our local television stations use it to get quick opinion polls. Ordinary people would only have accounts to communicate with these people. Certainly no one would follow their dull tweets.

ian skidmore

PS. I meant to point out that Twitter is the space age equivalent of those diaries we kept for about two days every year as children;
" Monday. It rained,Did homework. Went out" Nowadays,sadly, childhood lasts until the onset of middle age

Crystal Bullet

Rod’s pithy but hilarious attack on Fry speaks volumes on a generation of celebrities in the religious or political sense because there was nothing left standing by the previous Monty Python generation to attack. So Fry’s morality and intellectual compass are at the heart of the new celebrity kingdom. Can it survive as the world economy winches back a “reality battering ram” ready to unleash a knock-out punch on the UK? It is not yet obvious to whom or how it will deliver the reactionary force of change. So is it right to single out individual comedians like Fry for their lack of depth and publicly twittering that fact more widely?

The values of pre-Python era: profanity laws and censorship, homophobia and racism (apartheid) no longer visibly survive in public life. Satire, such as the Monty Python films, aided their demise. So, why is a new, reactionary movement predictable? These old morals, however old-fashioned, are those most closely associated with strong family values. Our current moral values tolerate: irreligious behaviour and foul language, sexual permissiveness, homosexuality and anti-racist smear campaigns. These are not tolerated by the new wealthy nations (Arabs and Chinese). Why does that matter?

The crash of 2008 means for these newly wealthy nations will be bankrolling our economies for some time to come. It does not immediately follow they will use it to attack our new moralities across the board. However what both sides will be asking is: what is the relationship between “lax morals” and “poor economic performance”? For that reason it is impossible to predict where the “reality battering ram” will strike. Is the comic genius of Fry productive? I’m not asking if Fry himself is productive, a question his bank balance answers! I mean: does his comic personality serve our nation with a type of escapism that is productive? I don’t have the answer to that. However the new governorship of the world economy is going to be asking us things like that and they are led by old moral values.

How could Chairman Mao have used Twitter? Perhaps Fry should send out this pre-Twitter tea-time phrase from Mao’s Little Red Book: “The Revolution is Not a Dinner Party”. He might then follow it, as Rod so well points out, with the list of sophisticated courses to enjoy.

Dave T

oh dear Rod Liddle, feeling like a nonentity ? Not enough friends on fb, want more followers on Twitter ?

John Billot

Agree with most of your view here. However there are a group of people using Twitter as a method of swapping ideas etc. It is quite effective in that respect. I would add I'm not one of those myself as I'm retired and lead a dull life playing golf and tennis!

JK

Given that a huge number of people born in the early 80s had mothers who were born in the late 50s/early 60s, wouldn't that make it two generations instead of one? Also, why 1985? All my friends have indistinguishable Facebook habits (although it is true that most people don't use twitter.)

Steve.W

Why would anyone want to hit Stephen Fry very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner?

Kevin

Twitter is not for pragmatic teenagers because, as I understand it, it is much less convenient than a mobile phone for sending happy-slap pictures.

I like Morgan Stanley's approach to statistics - projecting the tastes of one boy's mates on to the entire adolescent population. I suppose they would be happy to invest in "Whiskas" if just one owner said his cat preferred it.

Andrew S. Mooney

I am not upon Facebook. I don't twitter, and fucking hate everyone that I was at school with and have no wish to be reunited with any of them.

To imply that all people of my age are keen upon these things is insulting. By definition, anyone who doesn't do these things is not a part of the sample of witterers and so goes undetecte. Further, anyone under that age of 20 has little to twitter incessantly about, lacks the ability, a social group who reads it and possibly might even be aware of all of this....so they don't bother.

Oh god, I've just realised that I am Actually Writing In A "Comments" Box...Do you think that anyone who MATTERS is going to read this?

Can I have Rod Liddle's job? I have English degree. I can write rubbish to order.

Scan Head

Rod Liddle once again demonstrates his capacity for vacuousness, misapprehension and spite. Boring and Boorish.

(111 characters)

A 32-year-old on Facebook

So "the generation born between 1955 and 1985" is "middle aged"?? Absurd. Check your dictionary.

Main Entry: middle age
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
: the period of life from about 45 to about 64

Also, Facebook is what you make of it. I was reluctant to join, but I'm glad I did. It's helped me stay in touch with interesting people.

Mitford

Generation born between 1955 - 1985 ??????

This means I born 84 and my parents born 55 are of the same generation. While my little sis born 88 is of a diff gen. V vvv odd. Could this weird def have anything to do with the fact Rod is married to a much younger woman? Has he stretched dates so that he and Mrs Rod are of same gen? Only explanation one can think of!! Funniest thing about whole article - silly old goat!!

Wesser

I think that Liddle, as with a few of his contemporaries, thinks his writings are important. I think he's quite pompous. The New Media is like the old one in one key sense - there is much rubbish spoken and written in the name of elucidation. I follow Stephen Fry on Twitter. Though I don't hang on his every word, occasionally a jewel springs forth. As with Liddle.

Mark Sewell

It is quite apparent that you have got a little narrow mind, infact probably the brain of a tick!! It is quite plausible for me too understand that a tick would not use twitter or facebook, being a parasite. Facebook helps loads of people find friends who have had to endure extreme hardships like leaving their home countries because of some meglomaniac. Therefore then having to restart and rebuild their lives late in life, something you clearly have no idea about. To write about facebook and twitter without too much investigation is short sighted and extremely cynical. Why don't you actually remove your blinkers and look around, you might actually find there is more to life than your sad parasitic existence.

A. MacAulay

“Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.” R. L. Stevenson to his friend Sidney Colvin.

Weigh this against the ubiquitous banality of these tweety-pies and ask yourself who then is speaking to whom? This is the same as believing it to be lucky when a pigeon sh*ts on your suit.

Also, to those contributors who occupy approx. the last quarter of the comments, CNN (yes, I had time on my hands) stated today that under 18’s hardly use social venues because they think nobody is going to listen to them anyway. And how right they are! However exceptions are allowed for in every statistic and also in real life. What is objectionable and alarms Rod Liddle is the Tsunami of dribble that gushes and flushes throughout all the media and that S. Fry surfs along the crest, supported by nothing more than his own self satisfaction.

Shakassoc

(‘I have just tied up my shoelaces. I did the right one first. And then the left’).

That's interesting. I noticed recently that I always tie the right first and then the left. Then I noticed that I also put my socks on in that order. And my shoes. I've tried doing it the other way round and it feels horribly -- almost nauseatingly -- unnatural. Why should that be? And is Rod Liddle the same? Spooky.

Sherry

Right on mate!!!A true picture!!

Tom

It was said of David Frost many years ago that "he had risen without trace". Stephen Fry is his successor.

As for facebook, I was recently asked by someone I knew 40 years ago, and had bumped into again two years ago, to be "his friend" on facebook. I replied that I had no wish to join facebook but said if he sent me his address I and my wife would look him up next time we were in the area. No reply. Pathetic.

Robert Clark

This reads like another bitter rant from a has-been from the increasingly irrelevant old media.

On the positive side, some of the ill-mannered invective is top shelf.

Scott Latham

Rod, it's very well written, is a pleasure to read and I agree with what you are saying. I was disappointed, though, that your attempt to 'grope for a reason' gave us only the hackneyed and very incomplete one of old. I was born in 1960 and have often epitomised much of that crappy narcissism you speak of. But without even further narcissism I hope, I am compelled to grope a tad deeper and in a particularly British context (the 70's were wierd, you've got to admit!).
Unless you feel it would be pointless or too narcissistic (I'm not being cute here), why don't you think about having a crack at it, Rod ?

Andrew

Gosh, Rod, you really don't like being disagreed with, do you? Presumably you publish your material to provoke thought and comment. Why then attack those who comment, unless underneath you're terribly insecure about it all? Never mind, I'm sure you can still find people who'll publish your bullying tripe, if not quite so many who'll read it. Pip pip!

Dina

knowing that everyone will be interested I really don't like facebook and don't know why. I really like twitter and don't know why? The reality is I also don't have time to contribute to either!

Tom Nealon

You miss the point. My friends don't comment on the mundane through Twitter and neither does anyone else I follow. You have the power to follow anyone you like. No one is forcing anyone to read Fry's stream of conciousness, I'm not interested so I don't. Anyone with half a brain uses Twitter to follow people who comment on things they are interested in.

KenPem

Oh what a pillock. If you don't like Twitter... don't go there. Duh! If you like Twitter but don't like Fry... don't follow him! Narcissistic? Possibly. But you're obviously masochistic. Otherwise why would you continue checking on what Fry is up to, since it pains you so much?

Snowman

Rod, don’t let it discourage you that a sprinkling of the technology savvy Twitts are being unnecessarily nasty to that flamboyancy of expression that has been your hallmark since you left the loony opposite of the Right. I have a brilliant idea, never had any other, how to scale new heights in this never ceasing hi-tech battle. A truly epoch making conduit for exchanging meaningful views, news and what have you. Deadcert fit for our age. A mini-twitt, I call it (for continuity sake). Just one and a half word per message. Genius stuff, I believe, and about 11.3times more democratically idiosyncratic than its Big Brother.

Ged H

I'm with you MOST of the way on this, Rod ... I recently read a quote on an anti-FB site by a 20-year old which said "Our lives aren't meant to be lived in public" Hooray, maybe modesty and reticence might become the New Cool ...

Just two things though - I do find Mr Fry to be quite a Nice Young Man, and I was born in 1947 and consider myself to be in late middle age ...

Edward

The boomer generation has destroyed everything - culture, education, history, virtue, manners - and now there's nothing left to do but post stupid things on twitter.

Look at Monty Pyton, as someone else said. You'll find all their 'values' there.

How are we going to rebuild things?

Palafox

Surely there's a touch of narcissism in parading your opinions in a column weekly? Haven't tried Twitter yet but do love Facebook, creaking with hoar antiquity though I am...really enjoy having a number of conversations going with friends around the world. The level of conversation is of course up to the participants, as in any medium.

Mirka

At 26 yrs old, I'm middle aged...rather depressing, Rod! Hmm yeah I don't think so - there's a lot of difference between the view of my mother and I, who both fit this age bracket

Roger Evans

"Cue irate comments from spinsters defending Lord Fry of Luvviedom and suggesting you are jealous."

The word you're looking for (as Stephen Fry would certainly know) is not *jealous* but *envious*. Look it up. It's a word that you should learn, since it characterizes your post and seeps from every sentence of the useless article it comments on.

Fergus Pickering

You have to admit that Rod, even when he is writing a bummer, knows how to get people posting. And he's got me too. Touche, me old leftie luvvie.

Gill Walker

"We're all going to die tomorrow from a nuclear holocaust/disaster" is probably a greater worry than "a doodlebug might hit my street".