Opinion: Perspective - I'd like to complain about the complaints culture.(Viewpoint essay)

All this consumer empowerment, look where it's got us: 26,433 complaints, for goodness sake.

About 15,556 ads. That's an average of less than two complaints per ad Haven't these people got anything better to do with their time? In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority received the most complaints since its inception in 1962. We've become a nation of whingers. Or rather we've become a nation of people who think our opinion deserves to be heard.

Perhaps it's counterproductive to make an issue of it. After all, the ad industry desperately needs to retain its self-regulatory remit. So we should welcome all complaints and treat them all fairly, thoroughly, responsibly. But come on.

There are more complaints, of course, partly because it's easier to complain. If you wanted to complain in 1962, and most of the subsequent years until the arrival of e-mail, you had to write a stiffly worded letter and keep your fingers crossed it was actually received, read and considered.

The rise of the telephone made things easier, but still involved a degree of time and expense that helped to sort the genuine complaints from the idle gripe. But now that we can e-mail the ASA to vent our ire, it's so easy: heck, why not?

Yet our complaining culture is not simply a result of an effortless system for lodging dissatisfaction. It's also a result of the cult of the individual, the growing sense of our own importance and a growing belief in the wider significance of our ideas and opinions that has been nurtured by the digital revolution.

We're all blogging, Tweeting, telling everyone we know as often as we can what we think and feel about everything. And, of course, we all assume everyone's interested in this digital diarrhoea.