I'd like something recorded for posterity. I have been running this blog for going on nine years. I am on both Twitter and Facebook (though until recently haven't been very active on the latter). I read newspapers online day in and day out; I've been using email since some time in the 1990s; and ever since I got a mobile phone (I don't remember when), I have loved the facility of being able to send and receive text messages. So, one way and another, I enjoy being connected. And yet, all of that notwithstanding, I still have conversations with real people in three-dimensional space: conversations as fully back and forward as ever I did in the days before I'd seen the front or back of a computer. And though I won't pretend I've never interrupted one of these to read an incoming text message or look up some point on Google, by and large I do not talk to other people with my face stuck to my iPhone. No, I divide my time. What is more, I know plenty of other people about whom I infer the same is true.
I would like this recorded for posterity in case any future being should come upon the piece here by Simon Jenkins (and endless others like it) with its claptrap about 'fear of conversation' and the bad habits of internet connectedness. Jenkins's column turns a corner towards the end, but not before it has wasted a lot of space in uselessly regretting the benighted ways of the present.