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Once a week we'll have a heated discussion (we're too dismissive of each others' stances for it ever to become an argument) on the topic, which always ends the same way. "You just don't understand how it works or what a vital news tool it is," he'll shrug. Then he'll get back to correcting Lord Sugar's grammar, or taunting Wayne Rooney about a missed penalty.

He's right, of course. I don't understand what Twitter is. I don't know what a Hogwart is either but I still manage to live a full and happy life. I don't Facebook, BBM or WhatsApp. I don't post pictures of myself smoking bongs wrapped in loo roll on the internet, and I have no interest in peering inside the banal head of the bloke standing next to me at the bus stop.

I don't think you have to be Stephen Hawking to get the gist of Twitter, either. I get how marvellously clever it is to condense every thought you have into 140 characters or less – to reduce real life to trashy little capsules aimed at people with the attention span of teenagers. Why not do away with language altogether, while we're at it? Oh, wait a second, we have: Instagram.

I understand, too, how social networking – Twitter, in particular – gives people a sense of belonging. Like the "in" clique at school whose group laughter, heightened by their underlying insecurities, could be sparked by a single word or gesture, tweeters seek comfort in their little community – and this one happens to be global. Only the thing about little communities is that their "in" jokes and over-the-fence exchanges are deeply tiresome for everyone else.

The people who get the most out of Twitter, my husband assures Montague, "are a certain type of alpha male for whom it becomes a competition for the greatest number of followers, a competition to score points against each other and to behave effectively like supremely cocky sixth-formers back in the old college room."

When he puts it like that, what's not to like? But it's true that seeing great writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Bret Easton Ellis join in this race to the bottom is more distressing than hearing about Harry Styles tweeting "Cute as a b----- every single one of you!" to his 17 million followers – their mass response drowned out by the sound of 1,000 slot machines vomiting pennies into his pockets. The idea that anyone would tune into an official tweet from either One Direction or David Cameron – who, I can only assume, tweets down to his 498,000 followers both socially and intellectually – is pathetic enough to make me well up.

If Twitter were only responsible for trivialising and vulgarising life into a series of bite-sized, meaningless superficialities, I might have come around to it by now. I'm trivial enough to buy handbags on eBay and vulgar enough to live in LA. But it's the shared moments it has stolen, the way it has bruised my life by taking up so much of my husband and friends' time and energy, that I really resent. And all to what aim? A relentless pursuit of the eternal moi.