There's a good chance you'll not read the end of this article. Nothing to do with your staying power or because it's dull enough to euthanise an ox (I hope it won't be). No, chances are there simply won't be an end because, before I get there, I'll have seen some funny link on the internet and will have waddled off after it like a gleeful child chasing some bubbles.
It's social media that's done this to me. I'm addicted. I knew this for sure after watching Mo Farah win the Olympic 10,000 metres last summer. I admired his athleticism, his commitment, his tenacity, but most of all I admired the fact that he'd gone 27 minutes 30.42 seconds without checking his phone. Twenty seven minutes 30.42 seconds! How could he do it? I know it's meant to be an endurance event but surely that's pushing the human frame beyond its limits.
My phone is my Precious. The one ring(tone) to rule them all. Take it from me and within minutes I'd be Golluming about, all skinny-limbs-and-loincloth, screaming: "We wants it! We wants it!"
And there's my problem. Who wants to work when you could be sharing pictures of a dog that looks like Samuel L Jackson (google it – you won't be disappointed) or reading a blog where the chief rabbi confesses to eating bacon but it's OK because "he didn't inhale". (Don't google that. I made it up.)
The real culprit is Twitter. I'm always checking it, always fighting back the urge to tweet. It's like a disease (Twittourettes?). As a comedian, I can pretend it's for work, to try out jokes etc, but I know what's really going on and so does my poor neglected family, especially since that difficult moment a couple of weeks ago when I offered to take them out "as a special tweet" (thanks a bunch, Freud!). The truth is, my concentration span is now appalling. I'm hardly ever fully present with whoever I'm talking to as I'm busy wondering if what's being said might make a good tweet. I get a fraction of the work done that I used to and my concentration span is now appalling. The internet is making me more stupider.
But maybe I'm being hard on myself. A couple of days ago a friend brought her two-year-old round to visit. The little girl handled an iPad with terrifying dexterity and speed, like a two-foot tall Tom Cruise at his screen in Minority Report (actually, Tom Cruise isn't much taller than that, but let's move on). What really struck me was that occasionally she'd try her swiping and scrolling on other objects – a TV, a table – with little or no results beyond a finger smudge and a mild telling-off from her mum. She was learning a hard lesson: compared with the iPad, real life can be pretty rubbish.
I think I share some of her disappointment. Yes, the internet is full of dark and dodgy places and trolls and ranters and peddants (always spell it with two Ds. They hate that). But the virtual Twitter me is so much wittier and more interesting than the real me. Real me might catch up if it was socially acceptable in the real world to spend 15 minutes honing a witty reply to a question before you answer, but even in Islington, where I live, that's frowned upon. Similarly, in the virtual world you can block people. If only you could do that in reality. Just imagine how much better most family Christmases would be. And as for that old chestnut about a group of young people going out for a drink but spending all their time on their phones instead of talking to each other, who's to say their online communication is less valid than the "real" equivalent? They're still interacting with other humans (for the purposes of this article, posting a picture of your beer on Instagram counts as human interaction). Can we really blame people when, for so many – and I suspect this is definitely the case with trolls – real life is little more than a finger smudge and a mild telling-off from your mum?
Of course I'm slightly playing #devilsadvocate. What about seeing a smile or hearing a laugh or that awkward moment when you refer to the band "The Elbow" in front of your teenage daughter's friends (just me?). Some things you just can't replicate online. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote: "you can't actually shag on Twitter" (I paraphrase), though we probably all know someone who's tried. I just wonder if there really is that big a difference between, on the one hand, escaping into a good book or into a slightly more intense/extrovert version of yourself through drinking (both acceptable), and escaping into the internet or a slightly more intense/extrovert version of yourself online (not so acceptable).
Maybe that two-year-old and I are just ahead of the curve. Maybe it'll soon be fine to say you prefer the virtual to the real, and having a good attention span will mean being able to swing from object to object like Tarzan with his vines (by which I don't mean the six-second videos on Twitter). Maybe we'll soon start valuing the short, adrenalined genius of the well-crafted tweet over the lengthy slog of the novel. Or maybe I'm just trying to justify the fact that I haven't got much work done today. Still, who cares? I've just found a website of badgers that look like Louie Spence.
