Social media

Getting the sack was a shock but not a surprise

20 October 2018 9:00 am

It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to…

Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?

30 June 2018 9:00 am

For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…

It is a sin to die in the Land of the Depraved

21 April 2018 9:00 am

New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era…

I’ve faked my own iPhone death

17 February 2018 9:00 am

After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense,…

Corbyn knows elections are won on social media but the Tories have barely logged on

18 November 2017 9:00 am

There is a naive belief at the top of government that because the Tories are only a fart’s yard behind…

Ignore the Twitter cry-bully brigade – on social media, you reap what you sow

4 November 2017 9:00 am

The nastiest person on Twitter has quit Twitter. Because I’m so generous I shan’t mention his name. All I’ll say…

The new tycoons

14 October 2017 9:00 am

The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers —…

High life

30 September 2017 9:00 am

I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All…

The turf

16 September 2017 9:00 am

Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have…

Barometer

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Out with a whimper Usain Bolt managed only a bronze in his last appearance in the 100 metres at the…

Snobbery in the age of social media

12 August 2017 9:00 am

We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or…

The right kind of dumbing down

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…

Let’s keep up the Moggmentum

15 July 2017 9:00 am

‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns…

Letters

13 July 2017 1:00 pm

Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the…

Joan Collins: The celebrity trend I just can’t stand

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Not only are today’s young girls having to work hard on their abs, butts and glutes, now the likes of…

Nicholas Soames’s Twitter account is a miracle (and so is his diet)

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Miracles are not ceased. A few years ago, a kindly educational therapist took pity on John Prescott and set out…

The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets

14 May 2016 9:00 am

Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…

The internet’s war on free speech

14 May 2016 9:00 am

The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors

I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot

2 April 2016 9:00 am

‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question…

Why Joan Bakewell must be right about anorexia

19 March 2016 9:00 am

You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the…

What happened when my son went to school as Goldilocks

12 March 2016 9:00 am

Whenever I hear a leftie complain about being abused on Twitter, I think: ‘You should try being me.’ A case…

The sad decline of the teenage snog

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…

Long before Twitter, Wogan offered continuous conversation

6 February 2016 9:00 am

For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man.…

2016 will be a vintage year for tech billionaires and jihadis

2 January 2016 9:00 am

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year…

A Christmas parable from the Spectator’s business editor

12 December 2015 9:00 am

  I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes…