We social networkers need to Face reality

It seems I've got at least 178 friends. I communicate with them every once in a while. When I remember. When I'm not too busy. As with real friends.

Of course these 178 are not what you would call close friends. In fact, they are so distant I wouldn't recognise most of them if I stood next to the in the queue at the Post Office.

What's more, many of them wouldn't know me or even want to know me.

That's because some of them befriended me years ago and probably do not realise we are still in any way connected.

Mostly that little group consists of Tory MPs who wouldn't like to think they are still in any way linked to someone who was drummed out of their gang for saying the unsayable.

From time to time several local MPs Facebook me to let me know they still exist – though I suspect most of them employ someone else to do the actual updates, probably at our expense.

The point is, though, that I may well be among the one-third of the social network users who have more virtual friends on Facebook than they do in real life.

I am connected to one or two of my real friends and do occasionally send them messages. But only the handful who actually use the all-devouring social monster that is Facebook.

It seems, according to a new survey, people who use Facebook or its equivalent are all losing sight of what's real and what's not. Virtual reality is starting to dominate our lives.

Allegedly, according to this survey anyway, 16 per cent of us can be so consumed by electronic communications we can go for two whole days without actually talking face to face with another human being.

All that time we will be hooking up with people we don't know and will never meet but who we have nevertheless come to call our "friends".

It seems many people prefer it that way. They'd rather communicate via text message or the internet than sit down and have a real chat with another human being.

We've reached the stage where many of us actually prefer the virtual world to the real one.

Only this week I was told of a woman who only discovered her husband had left her and was looking for a divorce when one of her Facebook "friends" sent her a message asking if it was true. She had no idea until she checked his Facebook page, read his "wall" and saw he had changed his status to single.

No doubt it was a lot easier for the husband to dump his wife via Facebook than it would have been actually talking to her in person.

But it seems one third of Facebook users spend more time talking to "friends" online than they do face to face.

A quarter of us like Facebook because it boosts our confidence. That may be because online we are more likely to lie about ourselves and suggest we are more interesting, exciting, cooler and better-looking than the poor bare reality.

What a sad lot we Facebookers must be.

We're so insecure, frightened of the real world and desperate to be liked that we would rather keep the whole thing at arm's length.

As the poet TS Eliot said: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

I am not a Facebook fiend and, therefore, I'm not a very good Facebook friend. I actually check it about once a fortnight for maybe 10 minutes at a time.

At the last time of looking, I had 24 unopened messages mostly, if past experience is any guide, from people I don't know about things I'm not interested in.

The only time I have posted something on my "wall" which received an excited response was when my niece hacked into my account to announce I loved watching some trashy TV series.

This wasn't true. In fact I'd never even heard of it – though it was revealing to discover how many addicts admitted to watching every episode of "The Gilmore Girls".

Facebook can be amusing and useful. It can be a way of escaping from the grim realities of life and making vague acquaintances in far-flung places.

But does that mean the website is really worth a staggering $100 billion (say £61 billion)?

It's a company that records everything we think, do and say. It knows where we live and what we communicate. I find that a little sinister.

Arguably, it has added to the sum of human happiness and is therefore worthy of all the hype and hysteria surrounding it.

Today, like Google, that other giant of the internet age, it looks as if it's a mighty website which will sweep all before it thanks to its millions of addicts.

But it is not unique. Indeed, the survey referred to here was carried out for another social networking site altogether, called Badoo, where you can "chat, flirt and meet with over 147 million people".

Chatting, flirting and meeting people may never go out of fashion but, for all its flaws, you still can't beat the real thing.