There was a time when being social was meeting real friends in real pubs and drinking real pints of what we called, in the 20th Century, Beer. You see Beer was and probably still is the binding agent that glues the very fabric of pub goers all over the country. Drunkenness and drink related violence are the sides effects of late night boozing and was invented in Newcastle, by the Toon army. The point is, see… we go on these drink filled late night excursions because of our social nature, unless you are attending a dreary Christmas office party which is akin to being tortured. Corporate forced fun on a specific day of the year in a strange, darkened room full of over ambitious, selfish work colleagues is like being forced to smile by Kim Jong Un at gun point. What am I yaking about you may ask, I don’t know I’m literally making this up as I go along but the theme is to do with being social in a smartphone, social media age. We humans need the company of friends more importantly we need the company of our enemies even more. A poet once said “stay close to your friends, but closer to your enemies” I think it was Tennyson or Wallace or possibly Grommit. But the point is we humans are a social animal but it seems the interweb is changing all that. In the past if we wanted to see a friend we would get on public transport, walk, bicycle or drive. Or just meet up once every week at the local pub where we could discuss our latest million pound stock investments with the Prime Minister of England and a couple of criminals from Fleet Street. You know who you are. Now all this is being eroded by the interweb its Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, Snapchat, Backchat, Slapchat or what ever new fangled easy talk app Silicon Valley come up with next. In the past when we wanted to make friends across the globe we had something thing called Pen Pals. The poor would just get a bottle, write a message, seal the bottle and lob into the ocean and hope it would reach someone in America. Now we have Skype, but I’m sorry it just isn’t the same, the mystery of meeting “johnny foreigner” has gone like the way of the Dodo and hopefully Ant and Dec. My half brother Jeremy Clarkson may have his own opinions about foreigners, but he’s not racist I can assure you and he has plenty of black friends, he just can’t name any those poeple… because there are so many…but Jeremy is fond of a Jamaican Patois. Big bout yah. Today social media is the must do activity, having thousands or even hundreds of thousands of “followers” is a sign of your social media status. Why? why do people want to share so much about themselves, its beyond me after all we complain about the government or the press intruding into our privacy but then are perfectly happy to share everything about ourselves with Facebook, or Whatchat who then in turn re-distribute our information to governments who then end up spying on us or worse sell your information to a global marketing company who then compile a survey for you to fill. God I wish nuclear Armageddon happened during the cold war it would have spared us all from this social media misery.