I’M not elderly by any stretch of the imagination, but I am old enough to remember a time before digital. A time when humans communicated by the means of speech and telephone, rather than iMessage, Snapchat and Instagram.

This column isn’t a social media bashing exercise at all. I should make that clear. After all, the vast majority of the Daily Echo’s ‘audience’ is, in 2016, a digital one and very welcome it is, too.

But I do at times find myself pining for the past. I’ve always loved newsprint, you see, hence my job. I love the feel of it, the smell of it and the excitement of turning the page and finding a good story or a cracking headline. Print also makes you think - something the internet has sucked out of a generation in many ways.

But this isn’t about the media. It’s about life in general. How we interact with each other in this digital age and, more importantly, about how we treat one another.

The major downside of social media is the voice it provides for the kind of people who, previously, were rarely seen, let alone heard. I’m talking about the kind of people who made sick threats to the one-year-old daughter of Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy after his wife posted a picture of their child in his club’s colours.

The kind of people who, this week, have threatened Labour MP Jess Phillips, telling her she was “going to get it like Jo Cox did”.

For all the doors Twitter and Facebook have opened, especially in the week when Facebook showed it was eating the world with profits up 186 per cent, the platforms have also turned over all the rocks hiding the kind of cretins our society could frankly do without.

Away from the trolls, a term which really doesn’t do the vile nature of these people justice, social media has also drawn out our self-obsessed sides.

How many times have you scrolled through your Facebook timeline and seen a cryptic post from a friend devised entirely to entice you into posting “wht’s up, babe”? in response? (I removed the vowel because apparently that’s the thing to do these days). More often than not, wht’s up will be a minor row with the boyfriend or simply a bad day at work.

Of course social media has its good side. Both Twitter and Facebook are great tools for keeping in touch with people too far away for an expensive phone call or visit. They are also superb for sharing the news and, as a lover of all things ‘news’, I salute this. People also share grief via social media, particularly in the wake of global tragedies like the Bataclan Theatre shootings and Nice lorry attack. While the #prayforparis hashtag or Facebook profile images shadowed by the French flag won’t change the world, I suppose they make us feel like we’re at least doing something when, in reality, there is very little we can do. And we all know it, deep down.

In the hours post-Brexit vote, Twitter was awash with hilarious posts and GIFs - proving the British are the best at laughing off adversity with genuine panache.

A favourite of mine, after England were beaten by Iceland in Euro 2016, just days after the referendum, simply read: “This is the worst moment in English history since Friday.”

Regardless of this, though, the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to social media and the trolls are very much out from under the bridge.

So, for all the laughs and commercial potential for those of us in the publishing game, away from the day job you won’t find my Face on a Book any time soon. Unless it’s on my first paper-back novel.