'Wrote editorial today'

Whether it's an old-fashioned hand-written diary or the latest social-media platform, if you don't have something interesting to say, you'll probably say something anyway.

Unless you're extremely discriminating about choosing Facebook "friends" and people to follow on Twitter, you've seen your share of banal, pointless posts and tweets.

"Chicken sandwich at lunch was too dry", people tell the world, in all earnestness. Or "I'm really looking forward to the weekend". Or "wow, it's hot today".

Before we become too critical, however, we should remember that this sort of vacuous, vapid verbosity is not new to the internet age. Consider the case of Britain's John Gadd, 83, of Fontmell Magna, a village in Dorset. For 66 years, this now retired livestock consultant has been recording almost every detail of his life in a diary.

News reports put his collected works at four million words - War and Peace was only 500,000 - plus newspaper cuttings and photos.

This stunning project might be more impressive, however, if only the diarist looked up occasionally from his daily routine. As a forerunner of today's tiresome tweets, the Gadd Diaries set a high standard of self-absorption. On November 9, 1989, for example, the Berlin Wall came down. Mr Gadd records that in Fontmell Magna it was "beastly wet" and that he "worked until it was time to collect Barbara from station".

There's a lesson here for tweeters and Facebook posters: However old or new the medium, communication is only as interesting as we make it.