Last month saw the usual spate of newspaper articles ridiculing the circular letters sent with Christmas cards. A series of books by Simon Hoggart now documents the worst of these. Funny as his examples are, he’ll be hard put to beat the instance sent in by a reader of the Daily Telegraph: ‘I suppose the high spot of our year was John’s Nobel Prize.’
Even so, am I alone in being slightly uncomfortable with all this opprobrium? If you care enough to spend 50p sending someone a Christmas card, shouldn’t you expect them to spend a minute or so hearing what’s happened to you in the past year? Is it all that awful to hear that your children passed their exams? Why do we hate this all so much?
Largely it’s our national horror of self-promotion. I still find it sick-making when American cars announce ‘My son is an Honor Student at Random High’. (Evidently some Americans feel as we do, since I’ve just seen a bumper sticker for sale online which reads ‘My Marine can pick off your Honor Student at 500 yards’.)
But, unless they have time to write a personal letter to everyone, it’s difficult for British parents to update people on their lives without coming across as preposterous or self-important. The children in these families have no such problem, however — for they have adopted completely new ways of staying in touch with vast circles of near-friends.
The simplest and hence most interesting of these is called Twitter — found at http://twitter.com. This free service allows you to post (online or by text message) nuggets of personal breaking news in real time which your friends can follow. http://twitter.com/stephenfry is a well-known and popular example of this.
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