WHEN I agreed to write this column I made a promise to myself and to my family and friends that I wouldn’t use them as material.

Them: So... you’re going to write 400 words are you?

Me: Yes.

Them: Every week?

Me: Erm, that’s right.

I coughed, trying to avoid eye contact.

Hmm.

The colour drained from their faces.

I knew what they were thinking. We’re going to have to watch what we say and what we do. Otherwise it’s going to be in the paper.

And I really, really did mean it.

But a few paragraphs into my very first piece and I’d already mentioned three members of my family. I couldn’t help it.

What’s a writer to do?

There is of course a long and grand tradition of writers, artists and musicians mining their personal lives to feed their art.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney sieved their childhood memories while composing those exquisite songs Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. The former attempts to recreate the spiritual experience Lennon enjoyed as a boy haring through the grounds of the former children’s home in Liverpool.

Meanwhile, the latter is McCartney’s collage of memories of an ordinary suburban street in the city, complete with the eccentric characters he observed.

Dylan Thomas, who was born 100 years ago this week, constantly recreated scenes and memories from his life in his dazzling poems. The Hunchback in the Park recalls a figure he used to see as a child in the green space opposite his home in Swansea. And Under Milk Wood is a lovely, lilting tribute to the small-town life he witnessed living in Laugharne (recast as Llareggub) in South Wales.

More controversially, Tracey Emin famously plundered her life for her art. My Bed purported to be her scruffy, unmade bed from which she emerged after a spell of near-suicidal depression. This was then set up - along with detritus from her bedroom, including dirty underwear and contraceptives - as an exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London and entered for the Turner Prize.

I find all this fascinating, of course. It’s autobiography filtered through the minds of creative people and transformed into artistic gold.

Unlike the autobiography that now fills our every waking hour in the form of social media.

You might consider it a more valuable artistic contribution than Emin’s bed, but why does anybody want to see a photograph on Facebook of the greasy fry-up I had for my breakfast?

We do live in a self-obsessed age. Of course social media is designed to allow us to interact with each other. And used properly, Facebook and Twitter are fantastic means of engaging with others.

But one of the side effects is that it can become nothing more than a narcissistic exercise, with everybody talking about themselves and not paying attention to anyone else.

And without the rewarding by-product of a glorious work of art at the end.