Greg Wright: We're in danger of losing the art of real communication

Never mind the hunched shoulders, expanding gut, dreadful acronyms and saucer-shaped eyes. If your business wants to grow, you've got to spend hours in the strange, trivia-driven online world where everything is fleeting. If you don't, your customers could dump you or abuse you, it seems.

There's no denying that the internet can be a powerful tool. It gives power to people who might not deserve it. You may have heard the story about the musician who got his own back on United Airlines. He wrote a song about the day the airline allegedly broke his guitar. Apparently, it attracted seven million viewings on YouTube. There are a lot of people who clearly need to get a life.

Self-appointed gurus solemnly tell us that social media is the best way of having a "conversation" with customers through blogs – essentially journals published on the internet – and by targeting what is known in gobbledygook land as "specific demographs", in other words, customers.

Hitch a ride with the right Facebook grouping and the world is your oyster, we are told.

There's just one thing wrong with this thesis. It ignores one brutal fact. A large amount of postings on social media websites are inane, self-indulgent drivel.

Nobody would have missed them if they hadn't been written. Many bloggers resemble infants at the school nativity play. Their performance is only treasured by their nearest and dearest.

I don't believe we should copy the Luddites and demolish all that is new, but there are dangers of grossly overstating the potential reach and resonance of social media. Unless you are blessed with the wit and erudition of Stephen Fry, your brief musings are unlikely to command a vast audience. So the old fashioned way of finding customers and managing your reputation could still be pretty useful.

Apart from fostering an appallingly unhealthy lifestyle – society will soon be saddled with an obese, monosyllabic generation with terrible postures – the obsession with online communication reduces the English language to something charmless and truncated.

Perhaps social media's finest hour to date has been a campaign to stop X-Factor winner Joe McElderry from becoming the Christmas number one. I rest my case.

Should entrepreneurs be concerned about the emergence of a generation who spend hours hunched over a keyboard? Absolutely, because the consequences are profound. This point was underlined last week when I had lunch with Margaret Wood, the regional chairman of the Institute of Directors. What the business community really wants are people who can communicate clearly, she said. The best way to do this is face to face.

That's right – actually meeting people. Good time-keeping and a smart appearance are also important too. These are not virtues you can necessarily acquire in the blogosphere. To get ahead in business you really need to be a participant rather than a voyeur.

A Greek tragedy with a Yorkshire accent is doing the rounds of Britain's theatres.

Northern Broadsides production of The Medea – about a woman scorned who goes on a killing spree – may seem to have little to do with global economics.

But the massive problems facing the Greek economy could prove to have painful consequences for all of us.

We have had two EU summits to try and resolve the financial crisis and promises of decisive action to cut the Greek deficit. However, I'm not convinced that the Greek government will be able to implement restructuring quickly enough in order to steady nerves.

This modern Greek "tragedy" adds to a sense of deep unease at a time when growth figures for many euro-zone countries have been disappointing.

Many people expect the latest quarterly GDP growth figures for the UK – which registered a pitiful 0.1 per cent growth – will be revised upwards. That may be true, but I suspect it will not be by much.

The terrible weather in January won't have done the UK economy any favours.

We shouldn't take any comfort from the fact that the jobless figures haven't hit the nightmarish heights predicted by some in early 2009.

Over time, the public sector will be squeezed and the threat of unemployment will force many people who believed they had a job for life to rein in spending. As thousands join the dole queue, economic growth will be harder to find, even if exporters are being boosted by sterling's weakness.

Euripides – the chap who wrote the original version of The Medea – might have relished turning his quill to a tale about economic life during the never-ending winter of 2010.