CLINGING, as I do, to any vestiges of the 20th century I can still recall, it goes without saying that whatever mysterious attraction enslaves 500 million people to Facebook leaves me absolutely stone cold.

Having been a working journalist since my teens it goes totally against the grain to write something and not get paid for it, in whatever amounts such pittances might come, so to help some glorified geek named Mark Zuckerberg (although clearly no ordinary zucker) make another billion on the side would seem the ultimate in self-betrayal.

But, like footballers with ever more intricate haircuts, people with all-over tattoos or prime ministers who write books, you might wonder where Facebook users with real jobs and real lives ever find the time for their non-stop twittering (or is that something else?).

Of course I'd happily accept a position as the intellectual inferior of someone who can keep working efficiently with one hand while simultaneously charting every last iota of personal minutiae with the other, except that the Facebook fanatics I've known have mostly been bone idle when it came to the things that matter.

Leaving the rest of the office to double its efforts while you're informing nobody in particular that you just met Ethel in the loo, your cat's got worms or you've located some fresh asparagus stalks for supper, isn't even Adrian Mole, let alone Samuel Pepys.

Not even mentioning its sinister side, the obsessive use of such a high anxiety comforter is every bit as tragic as the muppets incapable of doing the weekly supermarket shop without a mobile phone pressed to one ear. Heaven help us if they ever devise a way of attaching laptops to a shopping trolley's handlebar.

Indeed the astounding vanity of anyone who presumes the rest of us wants to read their every unspoken thought is only matched by the daily traffic in emails from people I've never heard of who want me to 'follow' them; to Hell in a handcart, possibly? However, while I couldn't really care less what turns a Facebook page, it was interesting to discover amid the office spam last week, a survey of young Britons by a video games company which tellingly showed that in a top ten of "world changers" our own 'Desert Dave' Cameron tied with Martin Luther King for third place, ahead of Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

But when the same survey revealed that six out of 10 of them think Facebook's more important than the law of gravity, well, you could have knocked me down with a feather.