SOCIAL MEDIA: How To Leave Twitter: My Time As Queen of the Universe and Why This Must StopBy Grace Dent Guardian Books/Faber, 199pp. £7.99

WHEN WRITING about Twitter, the social media tool which allows users to express their thoughts to the world in no more than 140 characters at a time, people tend to split into two camps. On one side you have the diehard Twitter evangelists, who seem to believe that Twitter has removed the need for all conventional journalism and that finding out about the death of a celebrity on Twitter before all his family have been told is somehow proof of this. On the other, equally annoying side, you have the wilfully ignorant, who think the whole thing is pointless and inane, and make what they clearly believe to be amazingly original jokes about “twits” who use Twitter.

And then there's Grace Dent, the razor-sharp Guardiancolumnist and author of several smart and subversive young adult novels. Dent truly loves Twitter. But, like many of us who spend a little too much time every day checking the Twitter apps on our phones and laptops, she has mixed feelings about the whole phenomenon. Her new book is a pitch-perfect look at the charms and the dangers of the tweeting life, from the joy of bonding with total strangers to the gradual inability to experience any of life's pleasures without telling the world about it in 140 characters.

If you have already succumbed to the charms of Twitter, most of this book will ring all too true. Dent brilliantly skewers the greatest tweeting sins, from constantly retweeting praise of yourself to harassing celebrities, and also perfectly describes different Twitter archetypes, from the shameless social climber to the amateur wit. Regular Twitter users will nod (and sometimes wince) in recognition throughout.

I’m not sure, however, what the uninitiated would make of it all – Dent’s extended rant against the so-called Fail Whale, the image of a gormless water mammal that appears on your screen when Twitter is overloaded, is hilarious if you have been frustrated by its appearance, but I suspect it’ll be meaningless to non-fans. And although the book begins with an introduction to the tweeting life, it’s unlikely that non-tweeters will be engaged enough to read the whole thing.

Which on one hand is fair enough, because this book isn’t really aimed at them. But on the other, it’s a shame, because amid what are essentially excellent in-jokes, Dent makes some powerful and important points about social media. She’s particularly good on the way in which real friendships are forged online. Calling Twitter “the saviour of procrastinating homeworkers, stuck-at-home parents, folk with mobility issues, the inherently hilarious yet terminally shy, people with important things to say and many others with bugger all to say but a funny way of doing it”, she declares, rightly, that “alliances made on Twitter can be the stuff of pure joy”.

But perhaps the strongest part of the book is the section on women and Twitter. She points out the way the voices of women, especially funny women, are toned down in the mainstream media; I was depressed but not surprised to read of how editors have changed the cultural references in her jokes to make them more “accessible” to female readers. She reminds us that while ordinary-looking men bantering is prime-time television entertainment, a group of women cracking silly jokes with each other is not.

Twitter, says Dent, provides women with a space to have those hilarious public discussions. “You log on to Twitter and there are millions and millions of us. Women thinking and sparring and also, interestingly, making men laugh . . . Twitter gave me and large swathes of women a space to talk, interact and represent ourselves on a level we’re not generally afforded”.

Dent isn’t afraid to point out the negative aspects of computer usage (her description of what she calls “desktop multi-application spiralling circle of hell syndrome”, in which you find yourself clicking aimlessly between different applications and browsers for hours, is so accurate and terrifying it’ll make you want to get rid of your laptop immediately). But she reminds us that at its best, online life can be funny and warm and annoying and life-affirming. A bit like real life, really.

Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her young adult novel The Real Rebeccawas published earlier this year by the O'Brien Press