One of the nicest things about a couple of short breaks I took recently was being completely out of mobile phone signal range, writes Dan Wainwright.

Whether it was the idyllic hills of Drimsynie in Scotland or the charming family cottage I stayed in near Newquay in Cornwall there was barely a bar to be seen in the top left hand corner of my phone.

Finding my electronic appendage had been rendered little more than an expensive piece of plastic was, at first, disconcerting.

How was I to update Facebook, download the latest podcasts or keep up with what Jonathan Ross is saying on Twitter?

About 10 minutes later the answer came to me. It would have hit me hard in the face but it didn’t because I was looking where I was going instead of at my phone. And the answer was this: I didn’t care.

As I wandered around taking in the scenery of the cliffs at St Agnes, browsing the shops of St Ives and munching on pasties in St Somewhere-Else-I’ve-Forgotten it dawned on me.

Facebook is a waste of time, podcasts are just radio shows with the music removed (the DJs just want you to text in and play clips of celebrities laughing because they’ve got more money that you) and Jonathan Ross is an overpaid windbag whose ego is even more inflated because 200,000 plus people actually subscribe to his Twitter updates where he tells us what he is having for dinner and how much he loves Lady GaGa.

This week a survey revealed that schoolchildren using Facebook are more likely to perform badly in their exams than those that do not.

Parents and teachers have known this for years but the research was delayed because the researchers got distracted throwing virtual sheep at each other and looking at photos from weddings to which they were not invited.

I’d like to say that I came home from holiday having deleted the Facebook and Twitter applications from my phone, free from the time-devouring scourge of social networking.

Alas on the drive back the minute I got a signal I pulled over and immediately poked at least 20 people I haven’t seen in about 10 years who had absolutely no idea that they hadn’t been able to contact me.