I was forced on to the internet in the 1980s. I still don’t belong there

With regard to modern technology, I find that people of around my age — by which I mean people in their seventies or over — are divided into two camps. There are those who have embraced the digital revolution with embarrassing enthusiasm, knowing much more about it than it is decent to know; and then there are those who, almost as embarrassingly, take pride in knowing nothing about it whatsoever. The former seem determined to show that they are not past it, that they are in tune with the modern world, and, like teenagers, are never parted from their computers, emailing and tweeting as the day is long. The latter claim to see no point in email or any of the social media and talk nostalgically about the days when people used to write each other letters in long hand.

I find that I hover somewhere between these camps. There was a time in the 1980s when I was forced to become acquainted with the internet, then in its infancy, because I had joined the newborn Independent newspaper as a foreign correspondent and was obliged to file my stories by this electronic system. The Independent was, I think, the first British paper to go fully electronic in its communications, and I earned an undeserved reputation among fuddy-duddy friends still unfamiliar with such things as a thrusting young enthusiast for technological novelty.

I would like in theory to have remained on top of developments in this field; but as the years have passed I have fallen further and further behind, so much so that I now understand very little of what’s going on. At some point I registered with both Facebook and Twitter, feeling that this was the sort of thing one ought to do in the modern world, but I don’t know how to use either, and I don’t like receiving emails from Facebook telling me not to forget people’s birthdays or that I have received a kind of message called a ‘poke’.