Another Web Presence

If you're a columnist or opinion writer in 2012, it's probably tempting to look back fondly to the print era, when you'd only get to know what your readers thought of your latest piece if one of them happened to be sitting next to you as they scanned it in the morning paper, either nodding in vigorous agreement or muttering dismissively under their breath. Online publication has changed all that. Within minutes of your words going online, a stream of comments from readers will inevitably follow.

The 'bottom half of the internet', as it's become known, is widely ridiculed, often with good reason. It's bursting at the seams with shouting people, indignant people, people who choose to read the opening paragraph of an article and then launch an attack based on only half the facts, people who complain that the writer said X and didn't say Y, instant critics who are incensed that "you get paid to write this crap, so you should be representing our views", conspiracy theorists, and, of course, complete and utter bigots. That list of rancorous character types probably only scratches the surface; I've no doubt missed a few more unpleasant varieties. The online comments stream is probably the closest experience to sitting in a cesspit, just without the need to go for a shower immediately afterwards and scrub one's skin with carbolic soap until it bleeds.

Like many who look down on the commenters spewing their vitriol all over this argumentative netherworld, I find myself adopting a smug, superior tone whenever I proudly maintain that I rarely venture into the bottom half of the internet. But I'm in the fortunate position of being able to say this with a clear conscience because I'm just another reader, not an opinionated columnist.

I do, however, have a problem with those columnists - an increasing number, it seems - who take to Twitter a few hours after their latest piece has gone live and start deriding, even attacking, the comments their article is receiving on the publication's website. They'll tweet about "bloody [insert name of newspaper] readers being as idiotic as usual", or that the commenters "haven't even properly read what I wrote". Fellow journalists will give them a virtual pat on the back and add "Oh, they're always like that. Just ignore them". If you follow any columnists on Twitter, you'll likely have seen the sort of posts I'm talking about.

So I looked back at a few columns by some of the more notable names and, after gritting my teeth and donning my chemical protection suit, ventured into the comments. What I discovered was significant: only in a small minority of cases did the writer of the piece actually appear in the comments themselves to respond, discuss, clarify certain points, reaffirm the main thrust of what they'd written above the dividing line or, getting to the gruesome basics, have a good old-fashioned argument.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that columnists should spend hours wading through the responses to each and every piece, answering every single comment. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, as surely it's the quickest route to madness. Besides, they're not paid to do it (and in some cases, in the brave new world of free content, they've not even paid for the column itself), so why should they? I'm also not going down the path of suggesting that every opinion piece should be "the start of a conversation" or other such interactive new media claptrap (yes, I'm thinking of The Guardian and their current big idea of 'open journalism', in case you were wondering).

However, the fact remains that online comments exist, they're very unlikely to disappear anytime soon, and I would much rather see writers engage at least a little with the responses they receive instead of quickly retreating to Twitter - where presumably most of their thousands of followers aren't quite so critical - to lick their wounds and complain behind readers' backs. Indulging in a little engagement with online comments could well improve their quality and tone, as well as dampening down their general hostility, if the rampaging hordes - sorry, devoted readers - felt there was a possibility of receiving a direct response.

Perhaps all new columnists should be tested to find out if they possess the nerves of steel to cope with the often inflammatory responses their writing provokes. Failure would mean they're not suited to a position where they air their forthright opinions to the public on a weekly basis, and they should go back to merely raging against the world in online comments sections. Or on Twitter, along with the rest of us.

There's a thought-provoking article in The Guardian today about living alone, something an increasing number of people in our society are now doing. Eric Kinenberg, who penned it, has researched the subject in some depth, written a book about it (though with a cover price of £21, I don't think I'll be buying it any time soon) and clearly knows what he's talking about.

At one point, Kinenberg says "living alone is something that each person ... experiences as the most private of matters, when in fact it is an increasingly common condition". For me, this is the central point and the one I find most interesting. I know the reasons why I prefer to live alone and what I get out of the experience, but it's sometimes difficult to put into words when asked why I've chosen to do so. I know many people who also live alone, and - though I'm not especially inquisitive about other people's lives and I certainly don't want to go down the path of thinking that those of us who live alone need to be able to discuss it in some kind of disastrously self-help/self-loathing fashion - I do find myself wondering how similar, or how different, their experience of living alone might be. It's got to be more than the predictable references to doing the ironing in nothing but your pants, hoovering in the nude, or eating a family carton of ice cream in front of the telly while scratching yourself between the legs.

This article could have given me that small insight by offering up a few real life experiences. My inquiring mind would probably have been satisfied. Instead, after Kinenberg's thoughts, the second section of the piece moves on to talk to some 'notable' solo dwellers. 'Notable', in this case, meaning four authors, one DJ/television presenter, and one television presenter/campaigner. Not what I'd call a representative cross section of society. In one stroke the article defeats all the good work it's done beforehand in setting out how living alone is increasingly normal, how we shouldn't find it all so a) worrying for social cohesion and family life; b) fascinating; or c) a peculiarity only common to the socially inadequate, because it suggests to us that if we're anything other than a 'creative' type or a celebrity, living alone is a sign that we're failures. Or even worse, freaks.

It's our enduring obsession with celebrity writ large all over again. No news story, no article, no thinkpiece can possibly appear without a famous name attached to it. Of course, it's fine - indeed almost essential - for a writer to live alone in their secluded turret because they have to create their works of tormented genius, hunched over their keyboards from dawn through to dusk while agonising over every word. Living with mere mortals who don't share a similar artistic temperament would sully their high-minded creativity. The same presumably applies to artists and musicians. And of course celebrities can live alone because, let's face it, they're hardly ever at home anyway because they're constantly schmoozing at showbiz parties or glitzy film premieres. Home is probably nothing more than a pied-à-terre in a fashionable neighbourhood where they can crash out between social engagements.

That's not my life, though. The likelihood is, if you live alone, that it's not yours either. Home is my bolthole, my escape from the craziness of the world outside, the place where I can behave exactly how I want and let loose all the odd behaviours that I have to keep tucked away when out in polite society. That's probably the neatest summation of why I live alone. Having someone else here at all hours of the day and night would put me on my guard once again. This isn't to say, either, that I want to live alone forever. I was finally able to afford to move out of shared accommodation ten years ago, after living with family, with students, with friends and with other anonymous city-dwelling tenants for the first thirty years of my life. Living alone remains a relative novelty, and one I enjoy. But if I'm brutally honest, I'm not sure I still want to be living on my own fifteen years from now, when I'm in my mid-fifties, unless by then I have a much more varied and busy social life than my currently rather reclusive existence. I'm well on the way to grumpy, ranting middle age already, and my concern is that in staying on my own I would eventually cross over the thin line that currently stops me being one of those people with brown paper covering their cracked windows, who emerges only occasionally to feed stale bread to flocks of pigeons or shake their fists and shout unintelligibly at passers-by. That's for the future, however, and a personal hang-up that I need to keep in check. For now, living alone suits me.

To return to the article, I don't care for the no doubt well-meant thoughts on living alone spouted by successful writers and media personalities. They're not the norm, they're not the mostly anonymous faces we see every day. I'd prefer to hear from a nurse, a secretary, a sales assistant, an office worker, a taxi driver. Even, believe it or not, an average middle-ranking journalist. I want to hear from people like me, like us, who live alone - sometimes through choice, often through circumstance - and are happy doing so. Their views would also, I suspect, be rather less rose-tinted than those of a writer who needs the solitude to work on their latest novel. If you live alone, you're aware of the downsides, too - the times when you find yourself talking to the washing machine or the living room wall, going stir crazy and staring out of the window while wondering what to do with yourself, or wishing there was someone to talk to (as long as they went home after the enjoyable evening of conversation, of course).

If you enjoy living alone, such moments are thankfully quite rare - but they do happen, and as a solo dweller I'd like to have discovered, thanks to this Guardian piece, how other anonymous solo dwellers cope with them. No such luck. Instead, all I got was the oh-so-profound ponderings of Esther Rantzen and Alex Zane. It's enough to make me want to go out and meet people.

This weekend, as they're very keen to tell us, "The Guardian is opening its doors" for what they're calling an 'Open Weekend'. 5,000 people attending around 200 events, many of which are obviously focused on the media. It's part of the newspaper's new 'Open Journalism' strategy, recently launched via the Hollywood-style visuals of the much-discussed 'Three Little Pigs' television advertising campaign, which shows readers not only commenting on a major story, but influencing it and, in the end, breaking it open to reveal the true scandal behind it.

As a lifelong Guardian reader (for my sins), I can understand and sympathise with what they're trying to do. The hacking affair has ripped the covers off the murky world of the press, and what we've discovered underneath hasn't been pretty. Even The Guardian, which spent years tirelessly investigating the saga, has been tainted by association just because it’s another national newspaper. We don't trust our supposed free press anymore. We're convinced that all journalists are in bed with politicians, police and big business and ready to bend over backwards to do their bidding if the price is right and the lunches are lavish enough. We think that the papers only cover the stories that suit their editorial bias (or the interests of their proprietors), rather than the issues which concern us day to day. Meanwhile, even though almost every newspaper's online presence now offers commenting facilities, the critical rancour and - yes, as much as we hate to admit it - ugly bigotry which takes place in the bottom half of the page leads many journalists to happily confess that they never read what the public says - which in turn leads to the commenters becoming ever more apoplectic about the fact that no one is listening or responding.

Like politics, like the web, like social media, like society itself, the media is increasingly ruled by an elite. Sometimes we know their names and their faces (Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, plus James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks before their ignoble fall from grace), but often we don't (the notoriously reclusive Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph Media Group). The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, would probably wish to distance himself from such company, but he's just as much a part of it - even if he does place himself at the liberal, touchy-feely end of the media elite spectrum. Meanwhile, for all that The Guardian wants to imagine that its Open Weekend is packed out with average readers, a completely unscientific survey - i.e. looking at the #gdnopenweekend timeline on Twitter - suggests to me that the majority of people going to the event have either managed to clamber up to the middle rungs of the media elite ladder already, or they're the wannabes hoping they'll make it to those heights in the near future and so it can't hurt to go along to Kings Place for a couple of days and glad-hand absolutely everyone they meet.

Does The Guardian’s campaign really signify the dawn of an age of open journalism? Not by my reckoning. As with almost every recent move to open up closed worlds and reassure us that the elites are either being swept aside or were a figment of our paranoid imagination in the first place, The Guardian's latest idea is ultimately just a grand example of like talking to like: the media talking to the media about how it needs to be more open to readers - us, the little people - by involving them in the debate (the only problem being, as previously mentioned, that the debate takes place in the comments, which journalists won't be reading because they're full of irate readers complaining about not being listened to). It's on a par with the recent proliferation of social media panels discussing how wonderful social media is and how we all use it so creatively, how it's going to change the world through campaigning and ‘clicktivism’ and building helpful communities. Problem is that these panels are predominantly made up of people who either work in social media and are therefore zealots for the cause, or those whose experience of Twitter is a distinctly out of the ordinary one because they have tens of thousands of followers lapping up every inane tweet they type. It's on a par with political parties opening up to the great unwashed voting public by hosting huge meetings around the country, just as long as the audience members have been thoroughly vetted and carefully selected beforehand. It's on a par with our system of parliamentary democracy supposedly opening itself up to the masses by telling us that if we add over 100,000 signatures to an e-petition, it'll guarantee a debate in the House of Commons (it won't) and will make our politicians sit up and listen to our real concerns (it won't do that either). Maybe I'm overly cynical - okay, yes, I'm overly cynical - but to me it's even comparable to the campaign by Compass to introduce "a new Public Jury for the British public interest to propose reforms of banking, politics, media and the police". It certainly comes across as a great idea in principle, as it directly responds to our decaying trust in those previously respected bodies, but why do I harbour severe doubts about this campaign because of its roots in a left-wing organisation that allies itself with many leading Labour Party politicians, and why do I doubt that even if such a public jury existed, it would ever truly be "made up of 1,000 citizens drawn as a random sample of the electorate"? The political and social elite would never let it happen.

Whether it's in the media, in politics, on the web or in society at large, true 'people power' (the phrase is an awful cliché, but it's ultimately what we're talking about here) and the openness that should result from it rarely, if ever, gets handed down from above. Not without one hell of a fight. We should be suspicious if we're told that's what's happening, because it's likely to be nothing more than a mission statement limply tossed together from a selection of the latest buzzwords about ‘becoming more open’.

Pragmatically, the best that we can hope for is that the elite at the very top lets in a few new names and faces from below, some of whom might maintain their connection with the real world for a little while and thus shake up the consensus, until they in turn become the new establishment, the new elite. To that end, once the Open Journalism campaign has died down we can probably expect to see a few new writers turn up in The Guardian's Comment is Free section, but my suspicion is they won't go any further than a few appearances in that notorious lion's den. This time next year, the phrase Open Journalism will be long forgotten, like so many others before it that suggested handing real power to you and me. Anyone remember the Big Society?

 

Like many People Who Write, have forthright views about Stuff, strongly held convictions about Other Stuff and a belief that they alone can Put The World To Rights, I've often imagined that it's my destiny to be a crusading journalist or opinionated columnist. The reason I'm not comes down to one personality flaw: a lack of self-confidence. I'm not confident enough in my writing, and I'm certainly not confident enough to go freelance and put myself out there in the cut-throat world of freelance writers and journalists kneecapping each other with laptops in the battle to secure a precious paid writing gig. I'm 40 years old, I've started counting my grey hairs and reviewing my career thus far, and as a result I'm learning to live with this state of affairs while secretly spitting venom into my pillow about it every night before I sleep.

Where I count my blessings - a Pollyanna principle that doesn't come easily to me - is in the fact that thirteen years ago I accidentally found myself working in what was then the shiny new World Wide Web. Without ever becoming a journalist or writer by title, I've had the opportunity to write online for work purposes and, in turn, for pleasure. All of it has been mundane, relatively transitory, and I've tried not to overestimate its worth (though I've sometimes failed at this and tried to kid myself it was something more meaningful). If I hadn't fallen into a web career as a result of applying for a job that appeared to be something entirely different, I dread to think what I'd be doing now.

I'm still a passionate advocate of the web and all it's given us, especially in the fields of writing and journalism. The multiplicity of voices and viewpoints to which we're now exposed would have been impossible just twenty years ago, when the media sat in its fortresses and told us, the grateful and often awestruck consumers, what we should be thinking and the issues that should concern us. Yet I'm not blind to what the web has destroyed, either. The Signal has finally given in to the The Noise and retreated to an isolated farmhouse in the country, where it spends its time reminiscing about the good old days when it would occasionally manage to punch a few important messages into the heads of the public and leave us outraged and demanding action (rather than today, where we're so outraged about absolutely bloody everything that in the end we can't be bothered demanding action on any of it). The Noise, meanwhile, has recruited thousands upon thousands of willing collaborators to increase its volume to levels almost beyond human tolerance, which allows it to scream in our faces like hysterical babies from the moment we wake up until we retire each night, exhausted by the constant onslaught.

To maintain The Noise, to feed it, the media has to churn out 'content' - not stories, not features, not reports, not columns, it's all just become 'content' - at an alarming rate. Every major newspaper now exists on the web, and there are even more web-only news and opinion outlets competing in the same field. They don't need material for tomorrow morning's edition; they need it round the clock. They don't need a handful of editorial ‘think pieces’ by respected commentators; they need anyone with half an ill-considered opinion to pad it out into five hundred words and throw in a few controversial statements that'll hopefully ignite a firestorm of bigotry in the comments.

At the risk of sounding like a filthy capitalist pig, online media outlets are also businesses. We didn't seem to find this an unpalatable fact when we handed over cold hard cash for a printed newspaper, but somehow, perhaps because we were originally told the web would be the ultimate democracy, it's become distasteful to us now they're in a virtual environment. We criticise their pop-up ads and seizure-inducing flashing banners, their restrictive paywalls, their shoddy offers and their mobile app subscription charges, yet we don't offer decent solutions for other ways in which they could fund their existence. Sales of printed newspapers may have originally funded expansion into the online arena a few years ago, but these figures are declining and aren't likely to experience a dramatic reversal. In their early days, online-only news and comment sites were often backed by web giants with bigger and more important activities elsewhere - Yahoo! and AOL to name just two - but with the web increasingly dominated by social networking and Google, these faltering famous names have also increasingly had to consider making a viable business out of their media outlets.

Content on one side, business on the other, and in the middle are the massed ranks of freelance writers and journalists who have opinions to share and stories to impart. Their numbers keep growing too, because the dramatic expansion of the web since the late '90s has encouraged more and more people to believe they have things to say and the easily available means by which to say them - it's certainly what encouraged and enthused me during my first years online.

In short, and as harsh as it sounds, there are now too many writers. If there were relatively few places where these writers could pitch their work, it would be a brutally simple equation and the numbers of them pitching ideas would soon decline. But that's not what's happened. Instead, there are hundreds of outlets offering opportunities to get your name on a byline, but to feed the web's insatiable appetite for content while also making a profit as a business, they're increasingly asking contributors to work for free or for a pitiful rate per word which barely pays for the amount of power consumed by a laptop during the writing of the article. Both the supply and the demand are certainly there; it's just the transaction that's gone missing.

I'm not for one moment suggesting that writers should give in and be prepared to work for free - unless, as with the Huffington Post model, they go into it with their eyes wide open because they want 'exposure'. In which case, I don't think other writers should drag them over the hot coals and mutter about them 'selling out'. However, the current situation is obviously untenable. Of course the largest and most prestigious media organisations can afford to pay respectable rates for articles and features, but they can't be blamed for operating as businesses with profits in mind. That's the reality of capitalism in action, folks. We're also too far down the line of constant journalistic output to suggest that online media should cut back on the sheer weight of content being produced and concentrate instead on quality rather than quantity, in order that the fewer numbers of writers then required could be paid more fairly. No media outlet would pursue such a route because it would instantly render them less competitive.

While I frequently hear hordes of freelance writers justifiably arguing that they shouldn't be expected to slave away over a hot MacBook for no reward, I don't hear them coming up with any useful ideas about how online journalism can continue to afford the remorseless pace of commissioning and publishing without resorting to unpopular ideas like paywalls. From the online journalism camp, it's the same old excuses of "Fabulous article, but we can only pay you a pittance for a few hundred words and your hours of initial research". We've reached an impasse, and no one seems ready to budge or come up with any realistic alternatives.

Meanwhile, between the global reach of 24-hour TV news and the immediate response of citizens using social media in the midst of where the stories are actually happening, there's another argument which says that written journalism, whether printed or online, might be headed towards irrelevance before too long. I don't want it to die, because over the years it's educated and informed me about so much, but it's desperately in need of a new working model.

I'm sure there are many intelligent social media experts (whatever a social media expert is) who will analyse and pick apart the threads of this whole scenario far better than I'm about to do, but since I was thinking about it - and hence tweeting it - earlier today, here are a few points relating to the news story that has kept the internet buzzing over the predictably quiet new year period: yes, it's Rupert Murdoch joining Twitter.

First, @rupertmurdoch has a verified Twitter account - that's what the tick in the strange blue rosette next to his name means. Personally, I think it looks more like the kind of informational graphic you'd find on a carton of milk to reassure you that it was only produced by friendly, patient and politically correct cows, but let's bypass that thought for now.

Verified Accounts are given to Celebrities and Important People (please note that Celebrities are not necessarily, and frequently aren't, Important People) so that we, as mere mortals tweeting the banal details of our drab little lives, can be sure that the celebs are who they say they are, rather than just a lonely social inadequate called Derek sitting in his underpants in a damp bedsit in Swansea pretending to be Beyoncé. Or rather, that's what Verified Accounts used to be about. If you visit Twitter's own Help Center page to read more about their equivalent of the gold Access All Areas pass, you'll discover that "this program is currently closed to the public. This means we are not able to accept public requests for verification". Though all is not entirely lost, because they go on to say that "we're still verifying some trusted sources, such as our advertisers and partners".

But Rupert Murdoch is not an advertiser with, or partner of, Twitter, is he? Surely he's just an Extremely Popular (your mileage may vary) Important Person. How strange that he should therefore get one of the milk bottle tokens beside his name. Couldn't he have followed Twitter's own advice, again from the Verified Accounts page, about "linking to your Twitter profile from an official website" as it's "the easiest way to confirm your identity to your followers"? After all, I've heard that he owns a few notable media outlets.

So what's the big deal? Twitter just decided to reopen its Verified Accounts program on this one-off occasion for an Exceptionally Powerful Media Overlord. Maybe. It's their company, and they can do whatever the hell they like. Yet I do think it's significant that they took this action for the one and only Rupert Murdoch - a figure who, after an appalling 2011 in terms of global PR, was probably way down most people's Christmas card lists during this last festive season, not least those of the many celebrities who now tweet throughout each and every day about their breakfasts, their exercise regimes, showbiz parties, colonic irrigation appointments, and what it's like being the victims of some of the intrusive stories printed by foul or occasionally slightly fairer means in the various Murdoch-owned newspapers. I'm sure it'll warm their paparazzi-weary hearts to see the Hacker-in-Chief on Twitter.

If you were Twitter's management team, then, having given Mr Murdoch an extra special Verified Milk Token, you'd probably want to leave it at that and let the news spread like wildfire amongst the tweeting masses as it invariably does, rather than upsetting any more of your celebrity and non-celebrity users with the presence of such a contentious and divisive figure. He'd have no problem getting 53,642 followers (at the time of writing) in barely two days, even if the first thing he tweeted was that he'd eaten two freshly roasted human babies for dinner. Job done. But no, instead, Twitter decided to roll out the red carpet still further, with the company's Executive Chairman and co-founder, Jack Dorsey, taking to his timeline shortly after midnight on New Year's Day to inform his 1.8million followers that "With his own voice, in his own way, @RupertMurdoch is now on Twitter". Does he offer that kind of welcome to all celebrities, or just the ones who happen to be Exceptionally Powerful Media Overlords With Enormously Deep Pockets? They even found time for a bit of buddy-like back and forth tweeting about their personal philosophies of running a business. It was truly heartwarming stuff and, like you, I shed a tear or two - though it may have been a bout of nausea.

There's another small point which had escaped my attention until now - but not, thankfully, the attention of the far more observant @rosiemop or @tweetingteach, who both informed me of the fact in separate tweets today. In December, Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal purchased a 4 per cent stake in Twitter. Or $300million of the company's $8billion approximate value, if you prefer getting your figures in cold, hard cash amounts the likes of which make your eyes water. The Prince already owns 7 per cent of Murdoch's News Corporation too, making him that company's second largest shareholder, so in some ways Rupert Murdoch and Twitter are already in bed together - it's just that they're maintaining a little respectful distance by keeping a few pillows between them in the shape of a Saudi prince. (Work with me on this terrible analogy, please.)

Of course, taken together the above amounts to little more than heated conjecture. But this is Rupert Murdoch we're talking about - a media mogul who doesn't do anything by chance. In mid-2009 he said he wasn't interested in buying Twitter, but an observant businessman like him can't have failed to notice its huge growth since then. Six months ago he had to drop his long desired goal of taking full control of BSkyB and becoming an even bigger player in TV, while his newspaper business (in the UK at least) has entered very choppy waters thanks to the hacking scandal - these are factors that would lead a shrewd businessman like Murdoch into thinking about new and possibly more profitable ways to extend his empire, and social networking is the big new growth area.

Above all, Rupert Murdoch is a man who absolutely has to be in charge of the medium as well as the message - thus he's the last person who would, apparently on a whim while holidaying in the Caribbean over the new year, suddenly decide to turn into some kind of hip old codger and impress his grandchildren by checking out that Twitter thing all the kids are using these days. It just doesn't ring true as a typical Murdoch move, no matter how bored he might have become of listening to his wife telling everyone for the umpteenth time how she slapped down the pie-wielding madman of Westminster back in July. If he wants to talk to the public, he's got newspapers and TV channels which are ready at a moment's notice to act as his mouthpiece far more eloquently than he (as he's shown in his first faltering tweets) is able to do in his own words. If he wants to chat and swap anecdotes with Sir Alan Sugar and Piers Morgan, I'm pretty sure he'd prefer to call them up on the phone. And let's be honest, Rupert Murdoch doesn't seem like the type who would want to waste an entire afternoon coming up with punning song titles as part of a hashtag meme, does he? It makes no sense for Murdoch to just 'try out' Twitter for the sake of it - even, as some have suggested, as a desperate public relations exercise after a bad year.

Rupert Murdoch taking to Twitter is merely the first date in a romance that, if it hasn't already got to first base behind the scenes, he's certainly hoping will end in marriage before the end of 2012. Moreover, based on their behaviour thus far, it may well be that Twitter is ready to lie back and surrender itself to his lustful advances. I bet the dirty old man breathlessly whispers "...and that's for helping close down the News of the World" in Twitter's ear at least once, too.

It's clear to me that this rarely updated blog has become a place to which I venture only when there's a news story that has made me seethe; when a (supposedly) newsworthy event has managed to get its teeth cracking into the back of my skull, like an alien intent on sucking out my brains and slavering over the gristle in my neck. So be it.

Stephen Fry, then. I'll just leave that name hanging in the virtual air for a moment, whilst you frame your instant reaction to it. Some of you will no doubt be swooning, others will be seething. Not many, I suspect, will be greeting the reference to him with a mere "meh", because - based on some intensive scientific study I've conducted in recent months (i.e. I've looked at Twitter a lot) - a person's reaction to Mr Fry is akin to their reaction to Marmite, to Brussels sprouts, to being flagellated with branches or having their nether regions smothered with boiling oil: they either love it or hate it. There's no middle ground.

I definitely used to be in the former camp. Stephen Fry could do absolutely no wrong in my eyes. Witness, for instance, this sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I could watch that forever. I enjoyed his novels, his rambling pontifications across various TV programmes, his evident love of language and poetry, his often forthright political opinions, and his frank discussions on the subject of mental health - including his infamous disappearance to Belgium in 1995, on the eve of starring in a West End theatre production (an event which, to this day, has left Belgium with the unfortunate reputation that people only choose to visit it when they're not fully in control of their mental state).

Unfortunately, Stephen Fry has, over the years, taken on a new status: he's become - deep breath - a "national treasure". Indeed, It's a term that seems to have been created specifically for the purpose of referring to him. I rarely recall hearing the phrase used in the media or by the general public before it was bestowed upon Stephen Fry, but now it's everywhere. In The Guardian a few weeks ago the term crept into an interview with Jarvis Cocker, and I immediately feared the worst - that Cocker's witty, scathing but still down-to-earth lyrical sensibility and outlook on life would now be dulled, its sharp edges rubbed away, and that he would merely become acceptable fare for early evening TV audiences to comfortably coo over: "Oh look, there's that lovely Jarvis again. Oh, he's pouring scorn on the Royal Family this time. Bless. Now I'm a big supporter of Her Majesty, God bless her and all who sail in her, but you've got to love Jarvis, haven't you? He'd be a fascinating guest to invite round for tea." Others who have ascended to national treasure status include such unlikely bedfellows as Eddie Izzard ("Yes, I know he dresses in women's clothing and does rambling routines about philosophers, entirely delivered in French, which is all very pretentious - but he seems like a decent chap, doesn't he?"), the Manic Street Preachers ("They've been so much more friendly, approachable and tuneful since that weird, skinny, self-harming one disappeared and they stopped wearing balaclavas. Oh, get your lighters out and wave them in the air - it's that singalong one about having a design for life or something!") and, erm, Ann Widdecombe ("Come on, come on, be fair! Okay, so when she was in government she supported Section 28 and wanted pregnant female prisoners to be shackled when they went to hospital to give birth, but she was sooooo hilarious on Strictly Come Dancing!"). And if, as a result of the above, you're now picturing the gurning lead singer from the Manics, Eddie Izzard and Widdy entwined in a threesome, then I can only apologise and hope you don't have nightmares.

Stephen Fry, of course, is usually quick to dismiss his status as the UK's pre-eminent national treasure, and he does so in a flustered fit of sheepish grins, expressive hand-wringing and frothing false modesty. "Come come, dear fellow! Absolute absurdity! Ludicrousness beyond compare! Piffle and poppycock!" he no doubt replies, along with a slew of other phrases that I can't even begin to guess at because my lexicon is probably only half the size of Mr Fry's. But such denials are utterly futile, and he knows it. He has become a national treasure, and if the Queen dies tomorrow then the government and the Crown will surely pass over Charles, leaving him talking to his trees and tending his organic gardens, decide that William is too young, inexperienced and goofy, and immediately ask Stephen Fry to accept the role of Prince Regent and ascend to the throne with a faux humble regal wave.

I suspect, then, that I'm now one of the few people who neither loves nor loathes Stephen Fry. I'm merely in the "meh" camp. Indifference has taken over. I still like him, but I can do without the abject fawning from his 3.3million followers on Twitter (despite his mostly inane status updates). I can do without the smug, self-satisfied humour of over-educated public schoolboys which suffuses every episode of QI - though to be fair that's frequently the fault of the panellists as well as the host. And it appears that I managed to get through recent weeks without succumbing to the charms of Stephen Fry's exploration of language in his BBC Two series Planet Word because, well, it clashed with the final season of Spooks (don't judge me, please).

The mantle of national treasure is something to be avoided. Since Stephen Fry became the first inductee into its dubious Hall of Fame, it has adversely affected his humour - I can no longer imagine him producing comedy as sharp and surreal as the material he performed with Hugh Laurie; his intelligence - which he now seems to flaunt as a sign that he is above us lesser mortals, rather than using it as a means to inform others in an entertaining way; his political views - having been outspoken on various issues in the past, his hordes of Twitter followers have, very regrettably, turned him into someone who is afraid to have an outspoken opinion on anything; and even his empathy for people - I simply can't imagine the Stephen Fry of 2011 making a series like The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive from 2006, which aimed to investigate and explain a much misunderstood condition in a sympathetic way.

Like a Stephen Fry speech, this post is taking a long time to get to its point. But you'll all be relieved to know that we've finally arrived. This morning on BBC News, I spotted the following story: Stephen Fry on Qantas flight grounded by engine issues. This wasn't a plane just carrying Stephen Fry, of course. Even he's not important enough (yet) to afford private jets to fly him halfway across the world. No, there were 257 other passengers, 21 cabin crew and four pilots on board with him. A total of 282 other people who aren't Stephen Fry, who could have come to an equally nasty end if the engine problem hadn't been discovered and the Airbus A380 had instead dropped out of the air like a rock painted with the Qantas insignia, somewhere en route between Singapore and London. But, well, gosh, Stephen Fry! National treasure! Celebrity! Aircraft problems! What a horrible, horrible thought! It could all have been so much worse for poor Stephen! And the other people on board, of course. Let's not forget them. Whoever they are. Normal people. Unimportant people. Yes. [Pause.] But anyway, back to Stephen, who was busily relaying every moment of in-flight drama to his millions of disciples on Twitter, including "I should in all conscience add that staff are being wonderful & that morale is high and the passengers understanding & cheerful". So that's okay then. And as long as you're safe and well, Mr Fry: that's the main thing. National treasure crisis was narrowly avoided, and Fry's path to the throne is assured. What a blessed relief.

You'll say, rightly, that I shouldn't be so surprised. Our celebrity-fixated culture has increasingly spread its gossipy tentacles to the current affairs agenda. If there's a famous person involved in any kind of news story they're going to be the lead item in the ensuing headlines - yet it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Currently, it's frequently a country's own vested interests that dictate the reporting of news stories from abroad:

"One UK national has been slightly injured with a graze to the knee following an earthquake in a distant far-off place you've never heard of and probably aren't even particularly interested in. A further 17,000 people are reported dead."

In the future, I predict that celebrity involvement, rather than patriotic concerns, will assume greater prominence as a means of reeling in easily distracted readers and viewers:

"There's considerable relief around the world that the sudden outbreak of bloody civil war in [insert previously obscure country here] has so far not claimed the lives of any famous people, despite numerous casualties and deaths caused by violent fighting in some of the larger cities. Stephen Fry, who has been in the country filming Kiss Frodo's Ring, Peter Jackson's twenty-seventh Tolkien sequel and prequel, told his millions of Twitter followers that he was relieved to catch last flight out of the capital's main airport, and that 'all the other passengers and the crew are being simply and divinely scrumptious and understanding about why I've taken the First Class cabin all to myself'. Weeping and sobbing aboard the plane has apparently quietened since Mr Fry began walking amongst his fellow passengers, distributing signed copies of his latest book whilst also regaling them with an extended anecdote about the complex history of the word 'crepuscular'. We'll be talking to Stephen live, later in the programme. But now it's time for the sports news."

 

Sunday is usually a quiet day for news in the UK, probably because most people are hiding away at home, curled up in a foetal position and gibbering into their fists as they dread the start of another working week. Or maybe that's just me. However, while catching up on today's headlines - or rather, those stories that the majority of media outlets consider to be worthy of more in-depth reporting - I was struck by the distinctly warped sense of priorities on display.

Leading story

A multi-millionaire songwriter and musician with a face like a shrunken hessian sack of spanners, who last wrote a decent song in 1974, has got married for the third time. She's also a millionaire, which means she's not after his money - and that's an implied relief to everyone because, by all accounts, his last missus was a gold-digging publicity seeker and bonkers conspiracy theorist. The newsworthiness of this story, therefore, appears to be based on one overriding sentiment: "Bless the sad old fool - he's written some nice tuneful songs, but he's well past his best and, after that last wife, he deserves a little happiness, doesn't he? Plus, he might be dead soon, and then we'll only be left with the talentless drummer who complains about being famous and wealthy."

Developing story

A senior Cabinet minister has been caught behaving unprofessionally by apparently inviting a close friend/former flatmate/former best man/former lover (oops, no not former lover, not yet anyway), who has no official role, to take part in government business and attend negotiations with foreign officials, as well as allowing him access to department resources. While this is, of course, an important matter of trust in our politicians, the public's opinion of the Westminster old boys' network has by now crashed to such depths that this latest piece of news is akin to discovering the Pope is Catholic, or that dogs bark and cats mew.

Ongoing story

A billionaire businessman, who until a few weeks ago was at the helm of a company that came up with various items of consumer technology that some people rather enjoyed using, is still dead. Yes, we know he died five days ago but, remarkably, he is still dead. He hasn't risen again, Jesus-like. Unlike his computers, phones and other gadgets, we seem to be surprised that he can't simply be rebooted from scratch, possibly with a new operating system to make him work more smoothly. Devoted followers continue to gather outside his company's many glass-fronted stores in the world's most expensive cities, to build small shrines outside on the street before going inside to purchase another of his desirable consumer technology items. All signs are that they regard this as an acceptable act of mourning. Who needs to send flowers when you can buy a new iPod as a meaningful tribute to the dearly departed?

Other stories

Sport. Sport, sport, sport, sport, sport, sport and sport.

Brief mention

At least 2,000 anti-cuts campaigners and health workers, protesting against the Coalition government's controversial NHS shake-up, have crowded onto London's usually busy Westminster Bridge in front of Parliament. The demonstration, though, was peaceful. No battles with police or long hours of holding protestors in a 'kettle', no great camera opportunities for a reporter to stand in front of rows and rows of riot-shielded police officers, just people shouting slogans and waving placards. Despite the vital issue which has brought people out onto the streets - the future of the National Health Service and free healthcare - the lack of drama means it's not really worth covering in any depth, is it? In fact, you may as well hold off sending correspondents and cameras down to the scene until the demonstration is almost over and everyone's started going home, whereupon the whole event will look like nothing more than a few bedraggled people aimlessly milling around.

Not worth mentioning at all

The 'Occupy Wall Street' protests against economic inequality and corporate greed, which have been going on in the financial heart of New York since mid-September, have now spread to more than 70 US cities. Significant numbers of people in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world are finally making their voices heard, speaking out about the role of big business in the ongoing financial crisis, and criticising a tax system that favours the rich while penalising the poor. Once again, however, apart from a few incidents where police officers were too heavy-handed (pepper spray first, ask questions later), the demonstrations have generally been peaceful and good-natured. Move along, broadcasters, nothing to see here. Don't bother coming to report on the demos and talk to the protestors because, well, you might upset the US Government.

And now back to today's main news

Before we finish, we're going over live to a giggling, air-headed showbiz reporter standing outside a house in London's 'exclusive' St John's Wood district, the scene of the rock star's wedding reception, to discuss how much champagne has been ordered for the purposes of satisfying the discerning palettes of A-list attendees. Let's watch the various Bentleys, Mercedes and Rolls-Royces pull up and disgorge celebrity guest after celebrity guest. If we're lucky, the perma-grinning reporter will be ready to pounce on a few of them for a banal thirty-second interview. Did the bride look lovely? And just how lovely did she look? Did she look really lovely? Really really lovely? Oh good. Look, it's Ringo! Ringo! Over here, Ringo! Ringo! What did you think of the wedding, Ringo?

The web is about variety. It's about many doorways, which open onto multiple pathways leading to the thousands of pieces of content you're looking for (and sometimes not looking for, too). That's my interpretation. It's why the 'World Wide Web' - as it was known when we still talked about it using rather quaint terms that carried echoes of scientific inventions such as 'steam locomotive' or 'internal combustion engine' - immediately captured my imagination when I first went online in 1997. It's why I pursued a career in online media and, fourteen years later, continue to be fascinated by the huge potential it offers.

It's also why I've never understood the desire to standardise the web, to offer a 'one size fits all' approach, to close all those differently sized, oddly shaped entrances and point users to a single brightly lit, gaudily decorated corridor at the end of which lies everything they want to do online. In the web's early years, one could argue that services like the infamous AOL portal - plus MSN and Yahoo! to a lesser degree - were needed to encourage all those nervous, wide-eyed users to explore an often intimidating world in a supposedly safe, though highly homogenised environment. But in 2011, with the net so much a part of our lives - to the extent where even my 70 year-old mother, who only went online for the first time nine months ago using an iPad, can now cope with using different services for sending email, researching family history, watching videos and listening to music - surely this approach has had its day?

Not according to Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who yesterday announced the social network's far-reaching plans for the future - plans which, perversely, send us spinning back to the era when less experienced, less adventurous users required a qualification in escapology to climb out of the web's various walled gardens.

First on Zuckerberg's list of virtual land-grabs: apparently it's too complicated and inconvenient for us, with our already dwindling attention spans shrinking faster day by day, to get our poor dizzy heads around the idea of keeping photos in one online location, music in another and films somewhere else. Partnerships with a host of media suppliers will enable their text, video and audio content to appear on a Facebook user's timeline if they're reading, watching or listening to it. So, for instance, when I am semi-inebriated on a Friday night, drowning my sorrows and reliving my wasted youth by drunkenly wailing along to various embarrassing '80s bands on Spotify, everyone I know on Facebook will be able to listen in at the very moment I reach the most tragic depths. "Duran Duran's Wild Boys on repeat play? You truly are a poor excuse for someone with supposedly good musical taste," they'll mutter dismissively, and my reputation for only playing limited edition albums of experimental post-rock and cutting edge electronica will be forever tarnished. As regards more serious-minded pursuits, such as catching up with the news and scoffing dismissively at political commentators with whom I disagree, I'll no longer have to open a separate browser tab to read The Guardian, because my preferred newspaper will be right there on Facebook in its own app, no doubt nestled somewhat incongruously next to one friend's status update about attending a jumble sale in Pinner and another friend's photo of himself dressed as a comedy nun at a fetish party. Or something.

Perhaps more importantly, yesterday's announcement brought the latest chapter in Mark Zuckerberg's zealous mission for everyone's online identity to reside solely on Facebook. The web's leading social network now seems utterly convinced that we can only cope with having one location from which to offer a virtual window onto our everyday life in the living and breathing world of genuine human interaction. Hence the unveiling of the 'Timeline', with the intention of encouraging each user to put the events of his or her entire life onto a single scrollable page - preferably starting from the very moment they sprang, bawling and bloodied, out of their mother's womb. To someone like me, who enjoys socialising but also closely guards his privacy, such a prospect is absolutely bloody terrifying. Scrolling through forty years of my pitiful existence on Facebook might just cause me to finally leap from the rickety ledge of the midlife crisis on which I'm currently teetering, thus making it almost certain that my Timeline would never get to mark my my forty-first birthday and so depriving my friends the opportunity of giving me virtual gifts while uttering that supposedly amusing "Hicky Burpday" line as if no one's ever said it before. (Don't worry though, because I plan to trust someone with my Facebook password so that in the event of my death, they can adorn my Timeline with a virtual black armband and a photo of my cremation urn, uploaded via Instagram and given a tastefully aged sepia treatment.)

Since Facebook has received so much criticism over privacy in the last couple of years, the Timeline announcement came with the standard reassurances about providing a host of settings so that you'll only ever reveal the information you really want to share, and with the appropriate groups of people. But as anyone who has tried to use these settings in the past will confirm, the various opt-ins and opt-outs aren't exactly easy to understand. Even now, there's barely a day goes by when my Facebook feed doesn't feature at least one or two panic-stricken posts, usually written in uppercase and scattered with exclamation marks, proclaiming that if you don't change a particular setting in your profile then everyone on the entire internet will be able to view the shocking details of the filthy dream you had last night about an orgy involving two online acquaintances, your ex-partner, a long-forgotten school gym teacher from 1986, the comedian Ronnie Corbett and a well-hung billy goat. This tends to provoke one of two reactions: you either sigh wearily at another privacy scare, do nothing, and thus only realise when it's too late that everyone, including your boss, can read the multiple status updates you've written about wanting to batter that same boss to death in a frenzied attack using an industrial stapler; or you frantically tick a few boxes in your profile, get thoroughly confused, and end up revealing all those bloodthirsty, revenge-fuelled status updates, previously viewable only by your most trusted friends, to the online population at large. Including, of course, your boss. These kinds of scenarios will surely become even more common as the new, all-encompassing Timeline feature is rolled out to the massed hordes of mostly bewildered Facebook users.

In this continuing quest to have us put our whole lives online, we, the addicted users, are partly to blame. One of the major reasons that social networking has undergone such huge growth, to the point where it dominates our online and even our offline lives, is because of our mistaken belief that each of us is endlessly fascinating. I hate to burst your self-centred bubble, but we're not. For instance, it now seems almost impossible that anyone would enjoy an evening out with a group of friends and say nothing about it on their chosen social network, even if it was just a brief status update. No, we constantly feel the need to post up the unexpurgated photographic evidence, including seventeen close-ups of the meal in the Indian restaurant: "And here's the delicious Tarka Dhal we ate last night! NOM!" We're under pressure to show what a good time we had by adding embarrassing shots of our friends at their most debauched moments of drunkenness, without asking their permission but with their names helpfully tagged to the pictures for maximum embarrassment: "Look! Here she is with vomit in her hair, lying face down in the pub toilets! She was soooooo wasted! LOL!" But the fact is that you can only stare at so many garish photos of food or blurry snaps of pissed, red-eyed people (my endurance limit is one of each, though your mileage may vary) before they get as boring as your grandparents' interminable post-holiday slideshow reliving every moment of their annual fortnight's stay in an Isle of Man holiday cottage.

Ultimately, it comes down to the kind of social network you prefer - which, in the current battle between the behemoths, means Facebook or Twitter (because nobody quite knows what to do with Google+ yet, despite it already having over 20million users - most of whom are geeky early adopters like me posting updates about how great Google+ is, even as the tumbleweed blows around their feet). Facebook is unashamedly pursuing its ambition to be the place where you record every single inconsequential detail of your whole life, along with the endless photographs. It's less about the people you meet as a result of being online, and more about pulling into your virtual social sphere all those you're related to, are friends with, see at work or at school, or have known in the often dim and distant past. I'm not blind to Twitter's many faults - in particular, the insidious growth in promoted tweets, the endless army of ravenous spambots, and the fact that it's just as much of a waste of time as its immediate competitor - but to me it feels more vital (as a source for breaking news, sometimes by witnesses who are actually on the scene), more creative (thanks to users who create characters, spin out stories or reveal their sense of humour) and even more social (because it's undoubtedly an easier place to meet people you don't know, rather than merely associating with those you do).

My suggestion: Facebook and Twitter should help out all those social networking 'confuseniks', currently flitting between each service and trying to decide which is best for them, by fine-tuning one simple aspect of their products. All they need to do is swap questions. Facebook's "What's on your mind?" feels more suited to Twitter's rapid, random blasts of 140-character thoughts, just as Twitter's "What's happening?" would seem much more appropriate residing at the top of every Facebook page listing where you are, where you've been, how you got there, who you were with, what you're doing now, where you're going next, how you're getting there, who you're going there with, what filling you're going to have in your sandwich as you travel there and, for the final pièce de résistance, a photo of your sandwich while you're eating it.

If you've even a passing interest in social media, I'm sure you'll have read many critical pieces like this one and know that they invariably conclude with an announcement that the writer is quitting Facebook. Not this time, though. I suspect I'm not alone in finding Mark Zuckerberg's zeal for online world domination distinctly unnerving (plus he looks a little too much like the equally messianic Chris(t) Martin of Coldplay for my liking). And I know I'm not alone in finding Facebook's constant interface changes infuriating and uninstinctive, while the lists of privacy settings are confusing beyond belief. In short, every time I step away from Facebook I hate myself for wasting time there. Yet, like millions of others, I continue to log back in because it's a way of keeping in touch with people who might otherwise drop off my radar - and, while I'm there, I'm obviously unable to resist offering my latest 'entertaining' status update to the masses. Lucky them. Once the world's most popular social network starts tracking every moment of media I consume and offering my whole life on a single page, maybe I'll force myself to think again.

As someone who isn't a journalist, just a dedicated news junkie who probably reads far too many opinion pieces for my own good, I've long been an admirer of Johann Hari. This isn't so surprising when you look at the evidence: columnist for The Independent (tick), left-wing political views (tick), outspoken critic of religion (tick), republican (tick). Yes, that's all the liberal boxes filled in. I'm so predictable.

When Hari was accused of plagiarism earlier this year, after it emerged that he'd recycled quotes from some of his interviewees and used them as if they had been spoken directly to him as part of the interview, I felt distinctly uneasy. While a number of his interviewees confirmed that they didn't object to his actions because the words he had so kindly placed into their mouths from their writing or interviews elsewhere corresponded to their opinions and beliefs, it still amounted to lax journalistic practice. As Johann Hari clearly stated in today's lengthy personal apology in The Independent: "If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write 'she has said,' instead of 'she says'. You write 'as she told the New York Times' or 'as she says in her book', instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere." Yes, this is absolutely textbook stuff. I'm not bragging when I say that even I'm aware this is how a person's statements should be reported, and I've had almost no journalism training beyond a couple of mandatory online courses as part of my non-journalistic job.

If one were more generous in spirit than I am, it might be possible to forgive this lapse of good sense. Unfortunately, what isn't forgivable is Hari's confirmation of rumours that he used a Wikipedia username other than his own to make misleading - and in some cases downright malicious - edits to entries about fellow journalists with whom he'd had disagreements in the past. That's the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spiteful teenager tapping away on a PC in his or her bedroom, not an award-winning journalist in his thirties working for a respected national newspaper. To my mind, it's also a sackable offence, especially at a time when journalistic standards are, for well-publicised reasons, under intense scrutiny.

Yet the editors of The Independent aren't sacking Johann Hari. He's not even offered his resignation. His various acts of contrition, detailed in his statement of apology, include the return of a prestigious 2008 Orwell Prize for political journalism and taking an unpaid leave of absence from the newspaper until next year. He's also vowed to mend his ways in future by providing copious footnotes detailing his sources and placing the original audio of his interviews online.

Any emerging acceptance of Johann Hari's apology I might have been feeling was, however, immediately dashed when he stated that during his time away from the paper he would be "undertaking a programme of journalism training". In the background, I swear that I could hear the sound of the stable door being hurriedly slammed shut while the horse galloped towards the horizon. Apparently, Hari has never previously managed to squeeze in any vital education in the basic skills of his chosen profession because - and do I detect a hint of self-satisfied smugness in this explanation? - "I rose very fast in journalism straight from university". I expect that's an immense comfort to the many, many young people struggling to gain a first foothold in the highly competitive world of journalism having completed comprehensive and fully accredited training.

The Johann Hari saga once again demonstrates many of the more distasteful aspects of the media, political and social elite (okay, maybe Johann Hari isn't quite in the elite, but we'll let that pass) which we've seen dominating the headlines in recent months. There's the lack of responsibility for one's actions - at first, Hari offered wheedling justifications for the way in which he'd misused quotes; the sense that a guilty party will always be let off lightly if they're a notable figure - it's highly likely that a less celebrated journalist would have been handed their marching orders if they had employed the same methods; and the general astonishment that some people manage to rise to such important and respected positions seemingly without gaining the most basic skills of the job that you or I would be required to possess.

Despite my misgivings, I hope Johann Hari returns after this period out of the spotlight and continues with the powerful, often crusading journalism he's won acclaim for in the past. Though it remains to be seen whether I'll be able to trust his articles and columns in quite the same way as I did before.

Update: Since writing this piece, I've seen a few comments elsewhere online - understandably many of them from journalists who are friends or supporters of Johann Hari - saying "He's only a columnist. He made a mistake. It's not that important". I'd agree that when placed up against the phone-hacking saga, events in Libya and Syria, the financial crisis and [insert your own long-running headline news story of choice here], the words that Johann Hari did or didn't put into the mouths of his interviewees and the edits he made on Wikipedia are trifling matters. But Johann Hari isn't just any columnist. He isn't - thank heavens - one of those risible 'personality journalists' who is paid for submitting a thousand words a week to blather on about what they've been doing in their well-heeled life over the past few days offer a few bland thoughts on a couple of minor news stories and then mention encounters with a couple of celebrity friends. Johann Hari's writing is incisive, highly opinionated, and doesn't shy away from making harsh criticisms. He says in his apology that in his work he has "spent a lot of time dragging other people’s flaws into the light," and it's that crusading journalism which has gained him such a large readership. Now that his own flaws have been exposed, I do think they're worthy of discussion, and I believe that criticism of the surprising leniency with which he's been treated is entirely justified.

I've got tons of music. Too much of it, if I'm honest. And that's not just as a result of entering the era of the easily obtainable (and thus easily disposable) MP3 a few years ago, because before that I had too many cassettes, then too many CDs. Yet despite the fact that I have thousands of songs to choose from when I listen to music, if I were to tally up the numbers I'm almost certain they would show that for the last eighteen years, I've listened to the extraordinary sounds of one particular band more than any other - even though they only existed for about five years in the early '90s, had a relatively small musical output, and made virtually no commercial impact.

After two or three years producing music that was clearly in thrall to Joy Division and early New Order, in 1992 the frankly appallingly-named Disco Inferno discovered sampling, previously the preserve of dance music, electronica and hip-hop (they were particularly inspired by the production of Public Enemy's records). They plugged their none more conventional gloomy indie band set-up into cheap, off-the-shelf samplers and then started writing beautiful, emotionally affecting songs where the rhythms were provided by drums beating out the sounds of footsteps in snow, camera shutters or heels on a pavement, where the guitar strummed babbling voices, waves crashing on the shore or pianos falling downstairs, while a booming bass kept the whole glorious noise tethered to terra firma and prevented it from drifting into utter chaos.

Crucially, though Disco Inferno - perhaps regrettably - were briefly lauded by the chin-stroking experimental music crowd, their songs certainly weren't impenetrable. No, this was still pop music with beautiful melodies, memorable chord sequences, choruses and hooks; with lyrics of world-weary alienation and, unusually, even elements of political and social comment (which you rarely got in the Britpop blasting out of all the indie discos across the land). Despite their unusual production methods, Disco Inferno didn't just want to be listened to in rarefied circles - they wanted to produce pop music, but pop that was all about the future rather than the frequently '60s-obsessed past of floppy-fringed guitar bands.

Apart from their three albums, between 1992 and 1995 Disco Inferno produced five EPs, each of which showed a startling new take on their desire to seek out new ideas and go in different directions. I'm lucky enough to own these five CDs, though they sold very few copies at the time. Since then, the fifteen songs they contained have found their way to a limited number of new listeners - initially (before torrents and MP3s became the norm) through the zealous efforts of music journalist Ned Raggett in burning CDs and sending them out to people - but the audio quality was obviously less than perfect, which is unfortunate considering the intricate soundscapes at the centre of DI's music.

Now, after far too long a wait, the five EPs have been remastered and are being reissued on a single CD called, imaginatively, The Five EPs. I don't really need to own this CD, and I haven't actually bought a compact disc in almost three years, but I pre-ordered this one as soon as it was announced. While it's well over a decade old, this music still sounds like the future; a future that - despite post-rock, electronica, dubstep and any other supposedly trailblazing musical style you might like to mention - is still Disco Inferno's own unique vision. This should have been what the 21st century sounded like. Since it doesn't, even eleven years since the dawn of the new millennium, that's even more reason to retreat under headphones and listen to The 5 EPs.

Disco Inferno split up in 1995, tired and disillusioned by their lack of commercial success and their clear failure to convince the record-buying public that this was the sound of the future - not to mention a run of bad luck with record companies and even having all their precious sampling equipment stolen. Ian Crause put out a couple of singles at the start of the last decade, but they had a prevailing sense of being burdened by his experiences in the music industry, while the sound had undoubtedly retreated a little towards more conventional guitar-bass-drums territory. Then he moved to Bolivia. Yes, really: Bolivia.

There are vague rumours of Crause producing new music and once again following his own unique - some would say crazy - ideas on sound production. I dearly hope so. Perhaps one way to encourage him to re-enter the fray would be for The 5 EPs to sell thousands upon thousands of copies. You know what to do.

• Disco Inferno: The 5 EPs - remastered, reissued
• Disco Inferno retrospective
• Disco Inferno on Wikipedia
• Disco Inferno on Facebook

At the time of writing, we've had three nights of relative calm following the riots that took place in various cities across the UK in the early part of the week. The recall of Parliament on Thursday, the TV and radio schedules filled with specially extended editions of news programmes and heated debates, acres of news editorial - all of this means that we're now well into the postmortem, picking over the scabs to ask ourselves what caused the riots or, even more simply, "what went wrong?"

That's the philosophical side of the process underway then, which most accept is going to take some time. By contrast, the practical business of arresting the troublemakers and putting them before magistrates has moved very fast - certainly at a pace we're unused to seeing in our legal system. Courts have sat overnight to get through the cases - well over 1,600 of them at the last count. At the same time, the Government has been keen to show the country that ministers are taking decisive action as speedily as possible.

Ws should be concerned, however, that the public's understandable desire for rioters to be punished quickly does not cause the authorities and the Government to act in haste, to become overzealous in their policies, harsh in their judgements and careless in their statements.

First, we had the Prime Minister, during his speech in the House of Commons on Thursday, blaming society's current bogeyman of choice - social networks - for allowing the rioters to organise their movements. He followed this up with proposals (probably unworkable in practice, but let's not have that get in the way of a good headline-grabbing policy) to temporarily shut down sites such as Twitter and Facebook during times of mass unrest. Yet beyond the apparent use of Blackberry Messenger in communications between the rioting groups, which Blackberry's makers Research In Motion appear to have partly acknowledged, there seems to be little evidence of widespread use of Twitter and Facebook in organising the violence and looting.

What the Government seems less willing to admit is that Twitter, far from helping the rioters, actually played an important role in keeping innocent members of the public informed on the nights of the riots, as people shared details about areas to avoid and provided support for those who were trapped in often dangerous situations. It helped news teams cover the events too, as The Guardian's Paul Lewis has confirmed. Twitter also quickly became the source of a people-led clean-up operation which shamed the slow responses of Government ministers, as they unwillingly hauled their well-tanned carcasses off Tuscan sun-loungers and back to the UK. The uses that Twitter has been put to over the past week are perfect examples of David Cameron's cherished Big Society idea in action - something that he conveniently chooses to ignore in favour of continued criticism of social media.

Of course there was some misinformation on Twitter as the riots unfolded. That can't be denied (and should probably have been expected). Some of it was deliberate and in extremely poor taste - at one point a photo of tanks in a city square, which purported to show that the army was preparing to quell the violence in the capital, spread like wildfire, even though one cursory glance at the tanks' desert camouflage and the backdrop of Cairo buildings instantly confirmed that the image had been lifted from news coverage of events in Egypt earlier this year. But the vast majority of the information which later turned out to be false was initially given in good faith. Mistakes were made because of genuine confusion and a state of heightened tension which seemed to suggest that every passing siren meant the riots were heading your way. This isn't a problem only for social networks: incorrect information can be spread just as easily via face to face communication. Is the Government also proposing to stop us talking to each other during periods of national crisis?

Then there's the issue of the punishment rioters should receive, where proposals have only just managed to stop short of medieval retribution such as placing the guilty in stocks in city centres so we can throw rotting vegetables, Nike trainers and the remains of plasma TVs at them. Immensely satisfying, but hardly the actions of a civilised 21st century society. Famously, Directgov's e-petitions site has played host to the populist call, seemingly lifted straight out of a typical Daily Mail editorial, that "Convicted London rioters should loose [sic] all benefits". Currently running at 180,000 signatures, this long ago passed the 100,000 threshold guaranteeing that it will at least be considered for debate in Parliament. Putting aside the argument that all the rioters were the typical 'scroungers on state benefits' so beloved of the right-wing press, this is a punishment that goes beyond what any magistrate or judge could impose by law. It's merely pandering to the moral outrage caused by the riots. We've had the unruly mobs smashing the windows of stores and looting whatever they could grab, and now it appears we've got the law of the baying, righteous mob in response.

In London, the flagship Tory borough of Wandsworth - where I live, I'm almost ashamed to say - has certainly cottoned on to the prevailing mood amongst some sections of the public. On Friday, it became the first local authority in the UK to act on another controversial punishment proposed for those involved in the riots, as it served an eviction notice on a council tenant. Not that the tenant themselves was involved in the riot. No, it was their son who appeared in court charged in connection with the disturbances at Clapham Junction, and although (at the time of writing) he hasn't yet been found guilty, this appears to have been enough to persuade Wandsworth's housing officers to act. Evict first, ask questions - inconvenient ones about whether the son is actually guilty, about whether being made homeless is likely to be the best route to lead him away from a life of crime, about whether a parent should be punished for the sins of their children - later.

Finally, Greater Manchester Police - who had thus far been commended for using social media in a positive way to keep the public informed during the riots and then enlisted their services to try and identify various looters - had their own lapse into over-the-top tabloid-style reaction this morning, when the following message appeared on their Twitter account:

The sheer glee with which this tweet announces the extremely harsh sentence handed down to a woman, a mother, who wasn't even directly involved in the riots is extraordinary. One wonders if Greater Manchester Police have employed the services of a headline writer from The Sun. Needless to say, after a deluge of shocked and critical responses, the message was quickly withdrawn, an apology given and (ironically, given the last sentence of the original post) a half-hearted excuse offered.

The above incident, as with the actions of Wandsworth Council and the Government's proposals on social media, demonstrates the unpleasantly vengeful mood - guided and encouraged by typical outrage in the tabloid press - that's currently spreading through much of the population. It would seem that we're entering a season of witch-hunts, and I've got a horrible feeling that it's going to get worse, much worse, before we jolt ourselves back into a more sensible and level-headed outlook on society.

Update: What was I saying about hysterical, overzealous, kneejerk reactions? Thank heavens that this weekend's Sunday Express is maintaining such a calm, dignified and restrained tone.

A Posterous account, then. To add to my Twitter (where I am a leading member of OverTweeters Anonymous), Facebook (increasingly loathed, full of old schoolfriends I haven't seen in twenty-five years), Google+ (not sure what to do with this yet, but it comes across like a social network looking for a niche), last.fm (scrobbling seemingly broken, so you'll never get to see my '80s one-hit wonder obsession in action), Flickr (I don't take photos these days, sadly), LinkedIn (because I occasionally resolve to try and further a career that has seemingly ground to a halt), Youtube (never used apart from, of course, one test upload) and Quora (oh dear, that was a flash in the pan, wasn't it?) accounts. And then there's the rather dormant and thus rather pathetic blog which has been online in one form or another since October 2000; the tumblr where I post the web detritus and internet eye candy I see in passing; and even a vanity domain under my own name, where I briefly impressed approximately one visitor a month with a wealth of links to my various online activities plus a downloadable CV in case they wanted to employ me, before a Wordpress upgrade broke my template and I lost the will to put everything back together again. As if all that's not enough, there's the literary site I ran for 18 months but closed in August last year, the secret project I can't talk about, plus the handful of domains I've bought on a whim because of a fleeting late night idea about a great web project that was going to change the world, but which, needless to say, then never came to pass.

In short, the last thing I need is a Posterous account. Or a Posterous site. Actually, this raises a question of terminology that I'm sure is only of interest to an internet addict like me: what does one call a Posterous presence? Is it a site? A blog? A micro-blog? A thing? Or is Posterous aiming to be ubiquitous enough to "do a tumblr" and simply have users refer to them by the brand name: "Hey, check out my Posterous. It's entirely pointless."

I do have six good reasons as to why I'm here, now, writing this extended bout of navel-gazing on a fresh, new site. My OCD tendencies demanded ten good reasons, but that seemed to be stretching my patience and your credulity. These are probably more excuses rather than reasons and undoubtedly rather more about justifying this flagrant waste of time to myself, but since I'm currently the only one reading (and suspect I will continue to be the only one - though there's always the self-important side of me that believes I may eventually reach the lofty heights of a readership in low double figures), I'm going to list them anyway.

1. I used to write. I don't anymore. I miss writing, in whatever form. This may partly be an attempt to recover that long dormant habit. Or long forgotten love, if I'm feeling more poetic (which I'm not right now, if I'm honest).
2. While my blog would seem the natural place to post lengthier thoughts, I am rather scared of that place - not only because of the eleven years of material packed away in the archives, but also because my writing there tended to be more 'creative' (and yes, I do hate that term as much as you do), whereas I'm not entirely sure this will be.
3. I've been finding myself writing slightly longer posts on Google+. You know, almost like blogging. Like my 'thoughts' and stuff. God forbid. Thoughts put on the internet are so noughties, aren't they?
4. I have opinions on matters. Social, political and 'other'. I have nowhere to write about them in greater depth, so they tend to end up as cynical, passive-aggressive blasts of bile jammed into Twitter's meagre 140 characters. So Posterous may become the place where I spout such ill-considered diatribes, like some kind of incoherent alcoholic sat in a bus shelter slurping a bottle of supermarket brand vodka.
5. I am interested in the web. After all, I work on the web and have done for a month short of 12 years. As a consequence of falling into this career almost by accident, I was an early user of social media and extended that interest into my job. I don't often discuss the field I work in, but I have ill-considered opinions on that too. [Begin standard disclaimer] Though obviously my views are all my own and should not be regarded as representative of my employer. [End standard disclaimer]
6. And then there's the temporary nature of what I'm doing here. Posterous seems utterly disposable. No offence, Posterous, but you do. I like 'owning' my various websites, paying for hosting and domains, tinkering with code and fiddling obsessively with CSS to get the design just right. I'm a classic geek in that way. But such a level of ownership requires some commitment, whereas Posterous doesn't. If I don't update, no one will notice and it won't be costing me a penny. If I decide to delete the whole thing tomorrow, it'll take me approximately ten seconds in the user-friendly interface. So if I start becoming precious about this site - maybe talking about designing my own template or backing up the content offline for posterity - please come round and give me a slap. Because I'll deserve it.

Most of all, though, I suspect that I've started up a Posterous because I turned forty about two weeks ago. Having circled warily around such a mental state for the last five years, I have now accepted the inevitable and dived headlong into full-on midlife crisis mode, internally wailing "Oh God, what am I doing with my life?" at least seventeen times a day. I'll try not to discuss my insecurities and self-loathing here, but it would be wise to remember that this particular truth is the one that'll most likely be the constant subtext underpinning everything I will (or won't) write on these pages.

I wish the previous paragraph was a joke. It isn't.