Social media: In this digital age, you won't find your Ps and Qs on a keyboard There isn't yet a neologism to capture the hurtful and impolite way in which someone abruptly ends a lengthy and enjoyable text exchange without warning, usually when the other person has just asked a question, but it is, I'm sure, just a matter of time. I said: Isn't it? Oh well, maybe I ought to move north, where I'm sure the Prof encounters nothing but agreeability - face to face. I see no reason why he wouldn't. But elsewhere in modern Britain (and whisper it, even up in Lancaster), a great proportion of our day-to-day dealings with one another are carried out online and in cyberspace, where the same etiquette doesn't apply, not least because keyboard guerrillas happily skulk behind anonymous user (and, more saliently, abuser) names when they're scouring social media for victims. What particularly gets my goat is that trip-trap, trip-trap, you only have to air a single opinion in public and suddenly you can find yourself set upon by trolls eager to tear you apart simply for disagreeing with them. The way in which Professor Mary Beard and others were the subject of illegal - never mind immoral - death and rape threats because they had the temerity to lobby for a picture of Jane Austen on our banknotes is a deeply dispiriting case in point. I suspect the perpetrators wouldn't have been able to cogently argue the literary demerits of any of Austen's work in person, but out in the ether ignorance and Wi-Fi are the only weapons anyone needs to mount a hate campaign. The internet may have given huge swathes of the planet instant, empowering access to knowledge, but it has also given an awful lot of angry people a forum in which to vent the most absurd levels of unmediated invective, couched in foul language that would make a sailor, if not blush, then shake his head in bafflement. To suggest that the seething hostility fostered online can be switched off when the screen goes blank also falls into the category of wishful thinking. Not all of our impoliteness stems from anger, of course. Let she who hasn't taken a cheeky phone call at the check-out or distractedly texted while boarding public transport hold their virtual hand up. Well done you. But the reason why so many of us raised a ragged cheer when supermarket check-out assistant Jo Clarke refused to serve a customer who was using a mobile phone was because she was making a rare and courageous stand on behalf of us all against digitally derived rudeness. The "Stop Phubbing" website even provides printable posters for shops and restaurants in an effort to shame customers into behaving better. "While you finish updating your status, we'll gladly service the polite person behind you," reads one. No Tweeting, No Facebook, No Instagram, No Foursquare, No Sexting: respect the food, the music and the company you're in. But it is easier said than done. Anyone who doubts the addictive nature of smartphones at the expense of our humanity need look no further than that infamous photograph of Peaches Geldof, whose infant son, Astala, tumbled from his buggy as she chatted on her mobile. There were mutterings that she needed parenting classes, which of course was nonsense; all she needed was a hands-free set. Yet I have an uncomfortable inkling that smartphones are now so embedded in our psyche that there but for the grace of God would go a great many of us. Indeed, the Sophie's Choice between hastily snatching to safety a newborn or a factory-fresh iPhone 6 doesn't bear thinking about. But part of the problem is that we are seldom forced to make that decision. To his 007 credit, James Bond, aka Daniel Craig, has taken a lead by banning phones and laptops from the bedroom. Then again, he is married to Rachel Weisz, so I'm sure he has more entertaining things to do than play Fruit Ninja. Certainly, swapping keystrokes for eye contact can only be a good thing, and we should all practice the recommended digital detox one day a week. Polite interaction with strangers, friends and even enemies isn't just a social lubricator; it's also good for the soul in time-poor modern life. Above all, it reminds us that we were connected to one another long before the worldwide web arrived. And, as our mothers used to point out, long before state-of-the-art tablets were invented, manners don't cost a thing.