Twitter

I love Twitter. Just like the historian Dan Snow, I find the social media site to be an overwhelmingly positive experience, and a great place to make friends and acquaintances and share ideas. Sure, most of the friends I’ve made are as politically insane as I am, but that’s the inevitable result of any service that allows for social sorting. However, one point with which I would disagree with Mr Snow is the idea that the site is a force for the ‘revolutionary democratisation of discourse’. In fact one of the great attractions of Twitter is how hierarchical it is, with each individual being measured by the size of his or

One of the strangest and, in a weird way, best things to have happened to me in the past year was the emergence of a firm conviction among a quite large collection of internet weirdos that I spent my youth fighting for an elite unit of the Israeli army. It started after a boozy pre-Christmas lunch almost exactly a year ago, when a woman tweeted me. I vaguely recalled that she had tweeted me before, probably about Jews or bankers or Palestine or Dolphin Square or Jimmy Savile, all of which I get quite a lot and normally ignore. This time, though, she had a question. She wanted to know

Sriracha, for the uninitiated, is a chilli sauce, thicker and sweeter than Tabasco, with a garlicky tang. They eat it in Thailand and Vietnam, though the world’s top brand is made in California with a distinctive rooster on the bottle. Once you have Sriracha in the fridge, you find yourself adding it to many ad hoc meals: fried eggs, falafel, corn fritters. It’s ketchup for grown-ups: a comforting dab of something sweet and spicy that makes everything taste familiar. I’m fond enough of Sriracha, as mass-market condiments go. But mere fondness does not cut it in this age of social media. Sriracha is one of many foods — see also

After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering emails. Quotidian stuff. An early dinner with one of my sons, and I was in bed at a decent hour. Checking Twitter, I began to realise that a grim spectacle was unfolding in Paris. Soon enough, on-the-ground reportage was joined by rumour, inaccuracy and blatant misinformation. That’s the problem with ‘rolling news’ — and Twitter has become part of that industry. On the TV, the reports were more measured but far less immediate, with repetitious footage of police cars and emergency workers. Twitter was the more immersive and pulsating place

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read about the tweet in a newspaper, as I’ve never used social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and hope that I never will. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or any of the time, for that matter. They say that the most destructive four-letter word in the digital domain is ‘send’. (Just as the scariest three words in American literature are Joyce Carol Oates.) I recently received

I’m getting a lot of abuse on Twitter for saying that having been a member of the Bullingdon is more of a hindrance than a help in contemporary Britain. My comment was a response to a piece by Charlotte Proudman in the Guardian on Monday that Oxford and Cambridge’s drinking clubs ‘cement the succession of power and influence in Britain among a narrow elite’. In response to my claim, numerous people have pointed out that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Mayor of London were all members of the Bullingdon. The problem with this rebuttal is that merely pointing out that Cameron, Osborne and Johnson are

When the first schoolgirls ran away to Isis I had some sympathy for them — at least, I could see how they’d been suckered in. The girls were young, daft, desperate for a cause. They’d nosed about online, and found the Twitter feeds of jihadi wives who sell Syria as a teenage paradise: all fast food, deathless love, martyrdom and shopping. Because I felt for those first schoolgirls, I kept following their progress, checking for them online as they set up in Syria, married, and began to tweet themselves. But as I followed them on social media, my sympathy soon turned to disgust. ‘Happy #9/11’ wrote young Zahra Halane, one

‘I already hate Sam. He’s too chavvy.’ Can you imagine the outrage that would kick off if someone said that about a contestant on a reality TV programme? But that’s essentially what happened to Flora Shedden, a 19-year-old candidate on this year’s Great British Bake Off who was accused of being ‘too posh’ on social media. So what triggered all of this? Simply forgetting to turn on her oven because ‘at home we’ve got an Aga, and I’m so used to having it on all the time.’ This one statement triggered a stream of abuse on social media, with many commenters hoping that she’d leave the competition first. For what crime?

‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask me if I do WhatsApp, I say I don’t do WhatsApp and they never bother with me again. I deduce from this that not only can we not now meet in person (so 80s), we cannot talk on the mobile phone either (so 90s), and nor can we email each other (so noughties). We have to do WhatsApp. I don’t know what WhatsApp is and I cannot bring myself to find out. In answer to the next person who asks, I say: WtfApp! WhocaresApp?! GetalifeApp!! I was full up with