Bernard Ingham: Tablets are the drug that brings out the worst in us

First, we are in an advanced stage of addiction, not generally to some mind-bending drug but to a dangerously absorbing piece of technology – the hand-held tablet, which holds the user in its thrall. They rub it and stroke it as if it were some furry animal. And they even pore over it when they are crossing a busy road. The entire nation has its nose buried in these mobile devices where they can download what I am told is called an “app”.

Occasionally, the addicted talk to themselves. This is usually reckoned to be an early sign of losing it. But, if they are of the exhibitionist tendency, they gabble away to the entire railway carriage. Yet nobody comes to take them away.

The nation is so hooked that it is doubtful whether it would find a white coat without its head buried in a tablet.

I mention this advisedly. These infernal machines have not merely 
taken root in hospitals; they have spread, like Japanese knotweed, until they have taken over.

Now nurses walk around with tablets recording every damn thing about their patients.

This may or may not be useful in civil actions by ambulance-chasing lawyers, but I did draw the line when one nurse, I swear, invited me to identify the nature of a bowel movement from a range of about a dozen illustrations displayed in full Technicolor before me.

I did not quite succeed in showing that I was grateful for such thorough monitoring.

It could be argued that this degree of instant finger-tip recording has raised productivity in hospitals.

Looked at more generally, it could equally be maintained that the addiction to the app is entirely responsible for the stagnation of national productivity and holding back wages.

It is not easy to be productive when your personal technology demands your constant attention. Perhaps some university will feel the urge to put away its apps to inquire into whether developments in information technology are holding back the economy.

Whatever the verdict, modern communications are doing nothing to improve human nature.

Instead, they are souring, diminishing and degrading it.

I refer not to what seems to be a vast trade in internet pornography and child sexual abuse, which is only one aspect of the problem.

Instead, I see a bristling international horde of punters with vinegar in their veins ready to pounce on anything 
that enables them to exhibit their prejudices.

If, as the technological jargon has it, the issue “goes viral” across the internet, world fame briefly envelopes the originator. Yet he or she may have no greater claim on a balanced intelligence than Russell Brand, the BBC’s resident idiot.

This is not the age of the common man – freed though the common man has been to express himself – but the uncommonly silly.

Lurking among the uncommonly 
silly are those with their eye on the 
main chance. They are positively waiting to be insulted, humiliated or otherwise 
have their feelings bruised so that they can ostentatiously sue or heroically demand an apology.

Why, only the other day a mother demanded an apology from Claridges for asking her to think of the feelings of others in openly breastfeeding her infant on its premises. Sure enough, as certain as a reflex action, we then had a breastfeeders’ demo outside the establishment.

Then Lady Jenkin felt driven to apologise for saying the poor had forgotten how to cook. I’ve got news for her. It’s not just the poor. It’s everybody apart from those who appear on television’s endlessly boring food programmes. No wonder we are a nation of fatties. The microwave rules, OK.

On top of all this, the depressing conclusion I reached from my hospital bed is that free speech is threatened as much by technology as by bullying campaigners or governments.

Today’s degree of prejudiced scrutiny and ridicule does not encourage the serious to speak out. It causes too many people to measure their words.

It invents racism, offence and humiliation where none exists or is intended. It is making for a mealy-mouthed nation, one afraid of its shadow. Is this, I wonder, the secret of Nigel Farage’s success with the UK Independence Party?

In a nation starved of forthrightness, this curious cove is probably the only one thought remotely likely to kick over the traces.