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

I wonder what Stephen Fry would write on Twitter shortly after he’d been hit very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner? Most likely nothing: the dead don’t Twitter — they probably use Facebook instead. But what if the blow didn’t quite kill? Give him a couple of hours and he’d be back. ‘Head hurts. Strange viscous fluid leaking onto the carpet out of my ears. Can’t see anything. Hey ho, Stephen! The dinner gong has sounded! Must soldier on.’

Or something like that; certainly a sentence where he refers to himself in the third person and some whimsical exclamation or exhortation last used when Hilaire Belloc was in his prime. Stephen, remember, is Britain’s most brilliant man; as a symbol of excellence, he is what we have right now and probably what we deserve. Locked up in those 23 words of his — the ones he really wrote, not the sentence I dreamed up for him for when his skull has been split into two almost perfectly equal halves by a blunt metal instrument — are an awful lot of things which explain why being alive in Britain today is perhaps less pleasant than we all might wish. Let’s run through Stephen’s signifiers quickly.

There is the fact he wrote it at all, the fabulous, consummate narcissism of the celebrity who believes that his every action is, quite literally, remarkable. He went for a walk! He had lunch! But then, as a corollary, there are the legions of nonentities who receive this man’s banal messages and apparently value them. And, through this newish medium, respond on a democratic and equal footing as if their lives too were remarkable to the entire world.