"I meant, 'man, that was a great movie'."

Maybe it's because we're all spending so much more time these days sharing our thoughts and opinions online, or maybe it's because I'm growing cantankerous in my old age, but there seems to be a whole spoiler culture going on. I've been aware of and annoyed by it for a while, but it's fresh in my mind today because of the new Star Trek movie and the various online attempts of people to irritate me, as well as because of last week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, which as part of the plot had three Harry Potter spoilers and one for the Walking Dead.

Increasingly this seems to be par for the course. People think nothing of casually revealing plot twists, character deaths and endings, in some kind of grand assumption that anyone who cares enough about the films or shows or books in question will already be au fait with what happens.

There're quite a few problems with this assumption. First of all, I live in the UK, where we consistently get TV shows months after they air in the US. Walking Dead for us doesn't restart till October. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to avoid people talking about this show until October? You're all lucky that a) I've already read the comics and b) I don't actually care that much about the Walking Dead anymore.

Problem the second: it encourages piracy. Yeah. In order to keep ahead of the wave of spoilers that invariably follow an episode of any decent show, we have to watch said shows as soon as they come out. Coupled with problem the first above, this means there's a vast temptation to download new episodes quickly, from whatever source we can. It's little wonder the new series of Game of Thrones was apparently the most pirated show ever. Again, consider as a mental exercise how difficult it would be to avoid causal spoilers for that show... and again consider yourselves all lucky I've already read the books.

See, that's another issue - I don't want to have to hurry my reading, or my viewing schedules. I quite like being able to discover things at my own pace. Things are turning into "must-sees" not because they're wonderful or compelling but because we want to see them without preconceptions or leaked knowledge tainting them. I raced through the Harry Potter books even though I didn't particularly like them, because I knew I'd get narked off with people telling me what happens in the later ones.

And one final point... won't anyone please think of the children?

Mark Kermode, who does the Friday movie review show on Radio Five Live, is one of my favourite critics but has an irksome habit of giving away plot twists to classic movies, and does so because he reasons these movies have been out for umpty-thrumpty years and anyone who cared that much would have seen them already. Even disregarding my feelings above on how quickly people are supposed to watch films, what about the kids? There's a generation coming up behind us who've had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to watch a lot of classic movies. How many kids will reach the age where they take an interest in these films without knowing, say, who Rosebud is or what Charlton Heston found on that beach? Or for that matter the true relationship between Luke and Vader? By the time kids hit their teens they will have heard about or seen these twists a dozen times, parodied on the internet or in Family Guy.

(I acknowledge this isn't a new problem, obviously - I first saw a "Rosebud" reference in an episode of Ghostbusters when I was nine.)

Having a teenage child with an interest in movies is like fighting a losing battle with the entire internet. I managed to show him The Sixth Sense before any bugger could spoil it for him - but that did involve letting him watch it when he was twelve, which is not strictly age-appropriate. If we care about our kids seeing movies in an untainted state, does that mean letting them watch movies that are potentially traumatising at that age? Or that they have no interest in? (How can I persuade a teenage boy he really ought to watch Thelma and Louise before he finds out the ending from elsewhere?)

Also (and I appreciate this is a worst-case, scaremongering, and over-dramatic way of looking at things), what are we teaching our kids here? That it's okay ruin the enjoyment of others? We spend a lot of time (hopefully) telling kids that other people are important, as are their feelings and opinions, so this culture of blithely disregarding the feelings of others (even if... especially if it's a faceless mass of strangers on the internet) is troubling to say the least. I've literally met people who thought nothing of telling me the ending of movies because it didn't occur to them that such an action would bother me.

So, in summary... the world is changing, information and the way we share information is changing, and it's making us careless and clumsy. None of this is news. But it is annoying. Stop spoiling stories for the rest of us, you bastards.