The Daily Novel

According to an article in MediaGuardian this morning lots of journalists having joined Facebook, a social network which started in teenagers’ bedrooms. The article provides details of ten leading media figures using it, headed by Iain Dale, whose political blog as much talked about in right-of-centre salons.

Of the other ten I know four somewhat. Richard Sambrook, director of BBC global news, because I asked him to talk to my City University journalism students once. Andrew Neil, because I shared an office with him at The Economist in 1975. Cathy Newman, because she won the Laurence Stern Fellowship a few years ago. Jo Whiley, because she was a radio student at City University. Of this lot Jo Whiley is the only one I thought of as having a hot line to the teenage psyche.

I looked up the site and found to my astonished that I had registered a few months ago. I had totally forgotten. Even more astonishing I discovered that I had then set up an automatic feed so that it imports this blog automatically.

This made me warm hugely to Facebook. I can now see it as a kind of W. H. Smith of the digital age. They are distributing my nostalgic ramblings to the world’s teenagers. Today’s youth now has a window into the world of my youth, which I write about often, just like many old people.

I am not at all sure about how it works. There is a mysterious activity called poking, which for my generation has another meaning. Old men get locked up for poking. So I did not dare to try any poking myself this morning, despite the gallery of attractive pictures I found amongst the Facebook members.

But according to MediaGuardian 12,000 BBC employees are members of Facebook. So presumably this kind of poking is fairly respectable.