Rory McIlroy told us he’d turned off his phone, given away his laptop and is living like it’s the 1970s, man. And what happens? He wins. So here’s what you do now Rory: stay quiet.

Seriously, stop talking. All you’re doing is feeding the machine. The machine by the way is this: newspapers, telly, the web, me, an insatiable vortex of space waiting to be filled. But here’s the thing, Rory: it doesn’t have to be filled by you.

Now maybe you like playing the game that piggybacks on the game you’re good at playing. Perhaps you like the attention: why else do you volunteer so much. And maybe the whole corporate deal means it pays off in terms of bucks in the bank.

But seriously, you’re not short of dough and what’s the point of having a few quid if it doesn’t release you to employ the two words in the English language that are most useful to you right now: F**k off!

Days ago Rory, you found yourself sitting in a press tent at Wentworth talking about stuff that really should only be spoken at four in the morning over a bottle of whiskey to a mate whose sole function is to mutter a reassuring “it’s all right” every now and then.

So what if the media consultants said you had to say something. Seriously, here’s the something: F**k off!

Clearly a journo encouraging a high-profile figure to shut the hell up is incongruous. But sports hacks don't really count and anyway it was a serious news hound that recently informed me privacy is dead and isn't it wonderful. To which I replied, well you know the two words. Real story here There was a time when such a statement could have immediately been dismissed as bogus. And since there isn't yet an app to decipher thought, maybe it still is. But the real story here is how it can't be completely dismissed out of hand either.

McIlroy didn’t feel right NOT talking. That appears to be the reality of the culture now. If it isn’t on-screen, on-tap and out-there, it’s barely valid. And everything it seems is fair-game in a digital atmosphere that ostensibly encourages communion, transparency and openness but which can actually perform the contrary function of fostering a culture of prurient entitlement that brings with it some pretty fundamental privacy questions.

The example of the Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore highlighted this. Scudamore and a pal exchanged e-mails about a golf game they were about to have in which they indulged in some stupidly chauvinist comments, punning on the word "shaft" for instance, fnarring about supposed "female irrationality" and using the phrase – everyone hold their breath – "big titted broads". Wildean stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Private account A temporary PA got to see these e-mails on what Scudamore insists was a private account and was so "shocked" she felt compelled to show them to a tabloid because they were "a kick in the teeth to all women".

Any amount of coverage has arisen on the back of this, most of it centred on sexism and the supposed paradox of using such language while in charge of promoting women’s football in Britain, a task even his critics concede Scudamore has done well at.

But there’s a much deeper element to this than men regressing to schoolboy sniggering. Publicising these e-mails has been presented as some kind of public right-to-know when an argument can just as easily be made for it being an invasion of privacy as sleazy as the language employed in the e-mails.

Scudamore was a tool. Sniggering about shafts on the way to play golf is toolery: but the clue is in the destination: golf clubs are bastions of tooldom, by their nature often regrettable and chauvinist and naff. Most of them are as impervious to wit as the incubator in which those unaware of the mundane and unfortunate reality that even men in important positions privately talk crap to other men must reside. Private behaviour It must be a million to one against Scudamore even contemplating using such language in a public setting. That doesn't make him a hypocrite. It makes him human.

We all have different faces for different contexts. If any of you, male or female, declares you haven’t indulged in private behaviour you would rather not have held up to public scrutiny, then you’re lying, or in need of a life.

Scudamore immediately apologised but the resultant furore has almost cost him his job. Even David Cameron has got in on it by saying he would have fired him. For what – telling crap gags in private?

The usual ‘PC-gone-mad’ brigade has been out in force and there is a tyranny in an environment which can’t allow for dumb jokes without the professionally outraged looking for a head. But political correctness can basically be boiled down to good manners, not the sort of trite tokenism that can’t tell the difference between nasty insult and crass stupidity.

The machine though doesn’t care. Just so long as it gets fed it rumbles along, gorging on what’s available and getting more and more bloated with shrieking outrage, genuine or otherwise.

Some people don’t even get the choice of whether or not to feed it. But, Rory, you do. So now you’re back there in the 70’s, why not heed this sudden correlation between silence and success. Let the machine get its jaws into someone else for a bit. Stop bleeding all over the place. It wasn’t emotional incontinence that helped you win: it was turning off the tech.