Facebook: Everything you never wanted to know...

It is probably important to avoid generalisations about new technology, such as that its appeal is generational, and that the young alone are its clients and masters. I receive piles of emails each week from readers who say they are long retired. Only a few purists, of whatever age, now use a film rather than a digital camera. But I think there may be something of a cut-off point when it comes to what are called "social networking" websites such as Facebook and, more especially, Twitter. Being nearly nine years the wrong side of 40 it wouldn't occur to me to go anywhere near them; just think of all the books I could read, or conversations I could have, with all those hours instead. Yet it seems that most people I meet who have yet to reach the point where life begins are confirmed users of such services, if not addicts.

One of the problems of the new technology is that it allows instant and frequent communication. I can see that has its advantages; but it is truly advantageous only when the subject has something valuable to communicate. I keep being told that teenagers such as my own children now keep in touch with each other "only by Facebook". More sinister is the repository this organisation has become of personal details about those who choose to subscribe to it. Were I 15 I should, I hope, be rather careful about what I allowed to appear on my page, just in case I regretted it when future university admissions tutors, employers, girlfriends or wives came to explore it. And, as a colleague pointed out to me last week, if some young person commits a heinous crime (or, more usually, is a victim of one) it is only a matter of moments before full details that once had to be prised out of family and friends can be accessed by the media and shared with the world. I wish someone would tell young people that these things are not, despite indications to the contrary, compulsory.

Perhaps it is that the young – or, at least, those a little younger than I am – have very different estimations of themselves from those held by my generation. One very good reason why I would not join Facebook or Twitter is that I cannot imagine there is a soul anywhere on earth that I am not in touch with in any case who could care less what I am doing at any moment of the day. I cannot believe that anyone should want to spectate the ordinariness of my existence, for I certainly have no wish to spectate anyone else's. A younger friend said to me this week that the purpose of Facebook was "to keep in touch with people you don't want to keep in touch with": it is that self-regarding sentimentality so peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon cultures, or perhaps a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, that says one simply has to have an idea what people one once knew are doing now. This seems to me to contradict all sensible human nature, which dictates that one stays in touch with those in whom one has a genuine interest or delight, and one steers well clear of everyone else.

But these technologies are not just about raising a level of intimacy with someone one already knows. They are about putting out in the public domain full, often mouth-desiccatingly tedious, details of one's life for all to see. To me and millions like me that simply constitutes a self-inflicted invasion of privacy, and a shocking presumption that one's own life is of such enormous interest that everyone else must want to know about it. Perhaps it is only when middle age sets in that one has the wisdom to know that nothing could be further from the truth. This may all be part of our infection by the celebrity culture. We not only admire famous people, we feel they have an intrinsic value; and as such we feel we have to do our own bit to become famous, to boost our own value and validate ourselves.

Flowers may once have been born to blush unseen, but that is obviously not a 21st-century way of doing business. We have put an end to mute, inglorious Miltons. Now every mundane act must be shared with someone else, or else life is somehow cheapened.

I had lunch three weeks ago in New York with an old friend who is now a hugely successful magazine editor and media personality. She told me that, during lunch with someone in the same restaurant the previous week, her companion had excused himself briefly after the cobb salad in order to Twitter the news that little old him was having lunch with her. She is English, so we laughed.

The internet, while being possibly the greatest invention of my lifetime, is also (like the great inventions of the printing press, wireless and television before it) a means of purveying rubbish. In the internet's case, the rubbish purveyed is limitless and illimitable. The liberal in me loves the way in which freedom of speech can be extended and protected by the web, through the exchange of ideas. It is a force that I am sure will one day make totalitarianism impossible. But as with all other freedoms of speech, that of the web is roundly abused and this abuse is the price we have to pay for the liberty it gives us. The technology is used to propagate garbage of one sort or another. At one extreme there are the poisonous doctrines of racists, tyrants and extremists; at the other the drivel being pumped out, in a hecatomb of wasted time, about the little and otherwise unremembered acts of everyday existence, so that everyone can have, if not his 15 minutes, then certainly his 15 seconds of what passes for fame.

I start to wonder whether this novelty will wear off. "Social networking" itself is a disgusting phrase, smacking of ruthlessness and desperation. One wonders how it was that those of us who grew up in the age before the internet and the mobile phone ever met anybody and ever managed to forge any friendships at all. But then, if the purpose of Facebook is to keep you in touch with people with whom you don't actually want to be in touch, manifestly it is not about "friendship" at all – at least not in my definition of the term. In Burnt Norton, written nearly a lifetime before the internet, T S Eliot wrote: "Not here the darkness, in this twittering world". He saw it coming: Twitter and the like do indeed throw a light on so many otherwise stygian existences. But it is artificial, illusory and alarmingly shallow.