Why get sucked into the time pit of social media, when there are real friends we can actually speak to?

My first instinct after the notorious Danny Baker tweet was to comment on Twitter, but I’ve come to the conclusion that joining transient banquets of outrage is a pointless use of time

Are we really keeping in touch with friends when all we do is ‘like’ cute pictures of their kids? (iStock)

In days of yore, when you could leave your bike unlocked and your children alone in the park for the local flasher to keep an eye on, it was very normal to call people on the phone for a chat. You didn’t even need to know each other all that well – you just had to like each other just enough to sustain a natter.

Sometimes it was a pain: in the days before you could screen calls, you took a gamble when you picked up. It could be anyone. It might be your best mate, or it might be the dodgy guy you snogged when you were paralytic and accidentally gave your real number to. It might be the person you didn’t really want to be friends with, who always called you even though you never called them back.

I was both the maker and receiver of such calls in my more socially awkward decades.

Nowadays, a call out of the blue to someone who isn’t a very close friend – just to say hello – has become a very rare thing, but people still need people. The pervasiveness of social media means that we often know the holiday plans and dietary requirements of people who we’d otherwise have forgotten existed.

We type out our “Happy Birthday!” on the timeline of a friend when Facebook reminds us to, but it’s far less often that we pick up the phone and meaningfully contribute to them actually having a happy birthday. Barry Cryer is a notable exception: every 8th of June, he calls me up to wish me a happy birthday, and it’s the comedian’s equivalent of getting a telegram from the queen. We don’t know each other ever so well – it’s just a lovely thing that he does, and that always makes my day.

But are we really keeping in touch with friends when all we do is “like” cute pictures of their kids or dutifully write “Hot Mama!” under a picture of them stepping out for the night? We might skim the carefully curated and filtered surfaces of each other’s lives, but it’s hardly enriching when work, kids, and arguing with strangers on Twitter can mean that months or even years go by without seeing each other.

Recently, a friend and I had been trying for ages to meet up, without ever quite finding the time. After our latest bout of texting, she called me to catch up. “I forgot we could do this”, she said. So had I. We talked for over an hour, and I hung up feeling that we had finally properly connected – that we’d had a good laugh, shared some secrets, and kept a foot in each other’s lives.

Those of us who spend a lot of time on social media (me) will often find ourselves expressing an opinion on Twitter before we’ve even talked it over with a friend. I made a conscious decision to stop doing this recently, after I saw Danny Baker’s notorious tweet depicting the new royal baby as an ape.

My first instinct was to comment on Twitter, but I resisted as I’ve come to the conclusion that immersing yourself in these transient banquets of outrage is a fairly pointless use of time. Far better, I think, to read the responses from sensible people and then call a friend to talk it over, which I did: “Hey mate, what do you think about the Danny Baker thing?”

And from there, we had a long conversation. We weren’t entirely on the same page at first, but through the twists and turns that conversations generally take when you let the other speak for as long as they need to without interrupting them, I came off the phone knowing that I’d engaged with the issue as much as I needed to, and that there was absolutely nothing to be gained by going online to have a virtual punch-up with anybody.

My suggestion is this: if you find yourself in a textual to-and-fro with a friend, theoretically firing off an occasional message as you go about your life but in reality watching over your phone with half a mind always on the next reply, stop. Call them. Hear the warmth of their voice. Blather imprecisely, and at length, with someone who trusts in your essential good nature. Have a laugh.

Of course, there is always that friend that you simply cannot get off the phone, who launches into a whole new story or train of thought when you really need them to shut up and let you get on with your life (again, I am both of these people), but there’s always something you can say to draw things to a close. Like “must dash, I’m catching a plane!”, as someone once told me a few hours before I saw them in the pub.

But youthful social awkwardness and anxiety aside, life’s just better when you can hear the intonations and have the living, breathing back-and-forth of a naturally flowing conversation.

So think of that someone that you’ve been meaning to “diarise” with for a while, and give them a bell. It is, as they say, good to talk.