The last two weeks of my life have been filled with an extremely tiring influx of human interaction – a process that has led me to realise the degree of reliance I have upon my broadband to keep me connected to what I see as the ‘real world’ and how utterly incapable I have become of real-life social networking.

For me, it all began a year ago with a simple email sent to me from a friend asking me to check out her “profile”. Intrigued, I followed the web link and before I knew it I had promptly signed up to what was about to become the biggest virtual social phenomena known to man – it was a site called Facebook.

Like most people, I too started off with four or five friends, most of whom sadly seemed to be my own family members, but the list rapidly grew, and it grew, and grew, and grew. Today, my total ‘friend’s list’ has exceeded a hundred; something which is not uncommon to most Facebook users. My fascination with telling people about every little thing happening in my life grew, I started adding applications that would analyse my personality and reveal all, and there remain no stoned unturned, no question unasked, no fact kept secret. But, unknown to me, I had subconsciously slipped into a world of complete revelation and openness. There remained no mystery about me anymore, the world, it’s wife, and children knew who I was. I was being poked, super-poked, “x-d” and then even “desi-poked” by strange people I had met randomly, or worse, didn’t even know.

Social networking sites often have this effect on most people. Indeed, you might even be experiencing it right now; it becomes a drug, the need for constant attention, for love, respect and acknowledgment – a trait inherently familiar to human beings. It had indeed offered me, a person who already has such little time to share with others, the opportunity to be a social butterfly. But cracks quickly emerged when I realised that my Facebook life had not heightened my social profile, but in real terms, it had instead reduced it. Friends who would once meet for lunch or coffee now thought ‘wall posts’ and ‘virtual hugs’ could equate to dinner on a Friday night; birthday presents and phone-calls would be received as ‘igifts’ and an ‘ilike’ song dedications; and the worst one I think had to be the number of users methodically stalking each others "profiles" and "friends lists" to add on people who they were introduced to once for five minutes ten years ago.

But this week I was obliged to attend a number of social events which, in effect, forced me to emerge from my web-cocoon once again, to interact with real people, to meet, sit, talk and exchange verbal communication – it was refreshing, but it has equally been one of the most arduous week’s of my life. Needless to say, in this day and age, we have become addicted to instant relationship management; we are so addicted to these virtual connections to maintain our relationships that we forget the purpose of building ties in the first place. We forget that although an x-me hug can be delightful, it cannot replace the reassurance of a real hug; that although a wall post can be enough to tell someone you remember them, it still can’t give the familiar emotion heard only through voice and tone; and that although friend’s lists can exceed a hundred, of those, only one or two are real friends. It just goes to show, social networking is all well and good, just so long as you don’t get lost in the luring white, fibre-optic light of a rather distorted virtual world.