TIPPING POINT:There's a point in life when everyone twigs there's no point even pretending to go with the technological flow anymore, and that time has arrived

LIKE THE man on horseback tasting the dust thrown up by the first Model-T roaring past him: that’s the way this corner feels about social-networking. Don’t get it – never have. That doesn’t mean it ain’t the future. Clearly it is. But there’s a point in life when everyone twigs there’s no point even pretending to go with the technological flow anymore, and that time has arrived.

It was when Ross from Longford “tweeted” TV3 after Manchester United’s Champions League defeat of Chelsea. Or it might have been MaggotyMick from Mullinahone. “Fergie’s Done It Again,” the tweet read. Then Fat Froggie13 from Kilfenora opined: “Giggs Is A Legend.”

There were other pearls too, like “Torres Is A Joke.”

All of this was read out by a blonde with a forgivable accent – no, not Matt Cooper – who wound up imploring viewers to keep getting in touch by text, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. That was the enough-is-enough moment. Bye-bye future and embrace me, Past, to your Luddite bosom.

You see, I don’t care what Larry from Laois thinks, about most things, including football. Larry informing the world he believes Ashley Cole has a propensity for self-publicity is irrelevant to me, and, I believe, to the wider sporting public. It’s hardly revelatory either, considering there are Facebook pages containing information you’d blush telling a gynaecologist but which are free to anyone with a touchpad.

That’s the world we live in now, a technological wonderland where friends are multitudinous, nothing is too weird or banal not to float around the virtual nothingness of cyberspace and credibility is reliant on accessibility.

How else to explain this manic incontinent need to put stuff out there? There was a time when privacy was cherished. But that attitude is as antiquated as a large middle-aged man purchasing actual CDs from an actual shop: note to pup behind HMV counter – The Faces rock! And I’m paying your wages that enable you to fiddle about with your i-poddy thingy!!

There is a generation now that cannot seem to function without spilling every detail of their mostly blameless but still profoundly banal existences onto the web in great vomitous dollops of self-regard. There is no other logical reason for why someone would take the trouble to share with the world that their arse is sore, or that they’ve just ingested Cheerios, or that the guy with the hair from Fair City has just walked past.

We’re being engulfed in torrents of vanity.

Forget any validating nonsense about the world becoming a smaller place, and everyone being able to share news and shape their responses to it; the purpose of social networking is plain old attention seeking.

Even those overdosing on attention already are falling over themselves to Twitter their brains out. How can pampered, preening, pissed-up Premiership stars pout about their privacy when they tweet about how they’re worth so much more than 50 grand a week?

It’s not like you’d trust some sporting figures with the keys to a lawnmower, never mind a device where they can share their innermost thoughts. Australian Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Stephanie Rice responded to an Australian rugby defeat of South Africa last year with a Wildean: “Suck On That Faggots.” She lost a sponsorship deal over it, blaming her exuberance on an “outgoing personality”. To which the only response might be that she should go out a little more.

All of which is relatively harmless in itself, except it cumulatively contributes to perhaps the greatest fraud of all this showing off, this supposed egalitarian sameness which generates an illusion that everyone’s opinion is relevant. Here’s a news-flash – they’re not.

When I watch football on telly, the tweets of my fellow viewers are irrelevant. If there’s analysis to be done, then let it be done by those paid to do it. The outstanding part of RTÉ’s football coverage over decades has been the education in the game that John Giles Co has handed out to generations of viewers. Giles’ opinion on football is worth sharing with the country: Murty from Mullingar’s isn’t.

The godawful shame, though, is that Murty provides TV3, and every other media outlet, with a free opinion. How much cheaper it is to fill time and space with this stuff – and justify it in the name of interacting with the public – than pay up for the alternative. There isn’t a media organisation on the planet that hasn’t done the maths and responded to some degree.

The web is the natural home to those desperate to sound off from their cosy anonymity, filling vast spaces with their spurious, libellous and often just plain ga-ga prejudices.

And the result is a blizzard of information and opinion that we are told makes us more informed. It’s a bogus argument. Blizzards make it harder to see, not easier. And what we will see more and more is that expertise will become a casualty of this race to the bottom. What bean-counter is going to cough up for Giles when it’s so much cheaper to read out Connie from Reenascreena, no matter how piddling or irrelevant that contribution might be. Expertise is far too elitist a concept in this new democracy.

There was once a sure-fire way to sift out the Connies of this world, but time makes it look ridiculously old-fashioned. It involved paper, inside an actual physical envelope. The key was the ink used on the address: there isn’t a hack of a certain age who doesn’t know that green ink signifies “open this with a tweezers”. Lord alone knows what company produced such copious amounts of green ink, but the whack-job brigade invested heavily in it. Sometimes they tried to sidestep by using blue or black, but there was usually something in the scrawl – a bitter, vengeful harshness – that would tip you off.

I never thought I would feel nostalgic for the green-ink crowd, but I do. At least they went to the trouble of venting their spleen on paper, and buying a stamp, and at least attempting to engage on some sort of personal level.

Of course that didn’t stop it ending up in the bin. Now it ends up being read out by a blonde on national telly.