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On Sunday morning, in Puy-en-Velay, I climbed the 275 volcanic steps to the tiny chapel of Rocher Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe. There, in the gloaming, among the silent stones that have stood on this site for 11 centuries, it was almost possible to imagine the awe of those very first Christian pilgrims who in the 10th century… CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! Ah yes, the sacred selfie, now as much a part of the modern Camino de Santiago de Compostela as the rosary, the walking stick and the scallop shell. A Catholic grandmother taking photographs of her penitent grandson, devoutly picking his nose. A teenager snapping Insta-incense shots. A honeymooning couple in walking boots taking turns to light candles for the camera.

On a recent sodden weekend walk, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking: it’s not so bad. Not the slugs or the sky or the rain making its way down a gap between neck and waterproof. But I couldn’t do it. Losing heart, I turned back. Glump, glump, glump through the puddles. It rained through breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Same the next day. And the day after. I wore grey and sighed at the window. But I am aberrant. Melancholy is against the rules nowadays. I should have put on my yellow wellies, twirled my spotty umbrella, photographed myself in the garden and put it online with the hashtag #singingintherain. That’s what everyone else seems to be doing. If, like me, you are a natural Cassandra, then the present Pollyanna tendency is a trial.

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived to save teenkind. Poor nieces. Though they scuff their Uggs on the carpet and stare longingly at the door, I carry on. When I was your age, I say, we had no access to boys. Those of us at mixed schools had a few limp options, and the rest relied on miracles: a hottie met by chance on holiday; a friend’s brother’s friend. There was no social media, no looking someone up, so unless you bagged your hottie sharpish he vanished. Boys surfaced like rare sea-mammals for single sightings before sinking back into the fathomless unknown. No googling! Can you believe it, nieces? They can’t. They’re the Snapchat generation, born as the century turned.

Sriracha, for the uninitiated, is a chilli sauce, thicker and sweeter than Tabasco, with a garlicky tang. They eat it in Thailand and Vietnam, though the world’s top brand is made in California with a distinctive rooster on the bottle. Once you have Sriracha in the fridge, you find yourself adding it to many ad hoc meals: fried eggs, falafel, corn fritters. It’s ketchup for grown-ups: a comforting dab of something sweet and spicy that makes everything taste familiar. I’m fond enough of Sriracha, as mass-market condiments go. But mere fondness does not cut it in this age of social media. Sriracha is one of many foods — see also pulled pork, avocado toast, popcorn, kale, and custard doughnuts — that are now the objects of lunatic devotion on Twitter.

Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, or take the vaporetto to see Palladio’s astonishing church. But it’s harder to sneak inside the doors of the monastery in San Giorgio, one of the city’s 118 islands. It is now home to Fondazione Giorgio Cini, a cultural institution and retreat sufficiently magnificent and isolated to have hosted the G7 meetings of 1980 and 1987. Last week it hosted the Alpine Fellowship, a gathering of philosophers, artists, writers and musicians. This year tackled the question of self-expression in the age of instant communication.

On the way home from dinner with girlfriends I composed my usual thank-you text. Smashing company, delicious food, must see you all again. A couple of kisses. Feeling this wasn’t enough, I added a line of coloured pictures: an ice cream in a cone, a slice of cake with a strawberry on top, a bar of chocolate, a cup of steaming coffee — near enough representations of the puddings we had shared. The replies came back: smiley faces, rows of hearts, bowls of spaghetti (it had been an Italian), martini glasses. My friends and I are in our late twenties and early thirties, yet we communicate using emoji: the sort of cute, pastel-coloured symbols that we’d have been embarrassed to have in our primary school sticker albums.

Another day, another hack. This morning, Facebook and Instagram went dark. Facebook has blamed a technical glitch; ‘Lizard Squad’ celebrated another successful attack: Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015 Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for defacing the website of Malaysia Airlines. One of the more active of many mysterious groups, they have claimed responsibility for a range of online mischief in the last year, from hacking into online games networks to the temporary internet blackout in North Korea in December 2014 (although the latter isn’t easy to prove).