‘Colin has added you as a friend on Facebook’

You last saw Colin when you were twelve years old. From what you can remember, he was once sent home from school early after stabbing you in the leg with a compass. Now – fifteen years on – Colin seems ready to make amends. What a happy coincidence – he still lives nearby, and suggests meeting up for a drink.

Why does Facebook always succeed in resurrecting those old faces that one has worked so hard to leave behind? The classroom nerds, the former colleagues, the drunken lapses in judgement. ‘Pokes’ from strange women who are invariably either ropey-looking, selling something, or men in real life. In all likelihood, you are the first person Colin has contacted since his escape from Belmarsh prison.

I used to think a ‘face book’ referred to the Met’s flipbook of shoplifters’ mug shots. What this latter day bobby’s book and today’s digital dystopia have in common is their service as evidence of the sorry state of humanity. At least the former ‘rogues gallery’ would occasionally result in a conviction. The social crimes of Facebook remain unpunishable.

Facebook defines itself as ‘a social utility that connects you with the people around you’. This could not be further from the truth. Far from serving as an umbilical cord of friendship for the socially deprived, Facebook actively damages interpersonal relationships, harms job prospects, wastes time, and ultimately turns die-hard users totally reclusive. It leads your girlfriend to ask questions about your photos, your friends to ask questions about your girlfriend, and her friends to ask her questions about your friends. You don’t need this headache, nobody does. Facebook complicates our lives.

Yet prurient voyeurism and wanton exhibitionism keeps us hooked, and so, day by day, we log on, hungry for more low-grade banter and drunken photo antics. It is difficult to believe such a squalid distraction was valued at $15bn as implied by the price paid by Microsoft to acquire a 1.6 per cent stake last October – easily enough to buy each of Facebook’s members some real friends.

Facebook is a goldmine of tosh – a monument to mediocrity. Once the preserve of institutions of higher learning, Facebook now caters to the untutored masses – anyone with time on their hands and a keyboard beneath them. Not to overlook the advent of Facebook for Blackberry – further broadening the scope of Facebook’s perversion of business equipment from desktop to handheld, enabling Sharon to update her status every five minutes while ‘on the go’. Sharon is eating. Sharon is at home. Sharon is tired. Adult websites have long offered a similar service, only Sharon generally finds more creative things to do, and somehow always seems to enjoy.

Yet for each droning Sharon, for whom Facebook is merely an extension of a dreary everyday reality, we have a flamboyant Mike, depicting an exaggerated playboy existence through an endless stream of photo albums which chronicle the lifestyle he so desperately wants you to believe he enjoys. Mike’s life seems to resemble one long gap year – beach party one minute, daddy’s boat the next. Yet anyone with half a brain can discern that this drip-fed portfolio entitled ‘Even More Great Times’ depicts a weekend several years ago, probably bankrolled by Mike’s more successful friends who are not on Facebook who have long since realised that he is a mooch. So if you are thinking of burgling Mike’s studio while he’s “firing up” the Monaco Grand Prix, be warned: you are likely to find Mike sitting at his desk in his pants – uploading.

Sadly the addiction runs wide and deep. Mind-numbing status updates and staged photo albums are just the beginning: uploading photos of your bloated sister’s newborn baby for thousands of people to see is overly personal (and how has the infant consented to this?) and changing your profile picture every five minutes does not change people’s perception that in real life you are irritating and have poor personal hygiene.

So seriously is the ‘Relationship Status’ field taken by some users that it is as if the government validated tax benefits on this basis. Case in point – my ex girlfriend, who would rather Facebook, than face facts. The termination of our real-world relationship was just a minor quandary, but the climb-down from ‘In a Relationship’ to ‘Single’ status on Facebook was too much for her to bear: within minutes, she had upgraded from your humble narrator to Carlos Aguilar Lopez, a fabricated Latin sex man, with a profile picture that bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Plácido Domingo. I am just happy that things turned out well for her – only last week I learnt that she and Carlos are now married.

If, unlike me, you have funds to spare and do not consider world hunger or global warming worthy causes, you can purchase ‘Gifts’ for your friends on Facebook. Of course these are not real gifts, but rather icons of a cow’s head, or a pork chop. Happy birthday – here’s a pile of sick from Anonymous. How thoughtful.

Sadly Facebook’s influence is not confined to the virtual realm and regularly overspills into the real world – the one where you cannot just ‘remove poke’ and ‘de-tag’ people away. Remember Colin, with whom you have recently become reacquainted. He stalks the ‘Friends’ Events’ section hungry for a party to crash, readily capitalising on ‘Friends in Common’ to deliver his social calendar. He uses Profile information to devastating effect when offline, with such close attention that he knows more about your friends than you do. Soon they will be his friends – on Facebook they already are. Welcome to the information society.

What happened to putting pen to paper to elegantly articulate one’s feelings towards someone one cared about? Or to the intrigue of getting to know a person’s common interests as part of a gradual process, not by way of a data dump? Or to the concept of delivering a personal invitation by word of mouth or script, rather than a mail-merge? It would appear that such niceties have been relinquished along with other staples of old-world charm – the Facebook Revolution signals a whole new era of meaningless interaction. This is Colin’s world: the world of the Secret Crush and the Superpoke. And Colin has 2,500 friends.