I failed to do social networking. It isn’t that I did not try. I befriended 250 people on Facebook, I signed up to broadcast tweets into the ether, I put my life up on display on MySpace, I was open for business on Linkedin. The problem was not knowing what to do after I had done all this.

There were benefits to being found and to finding others on Facebook, and I got in touch with friends from school again. But there wasn’t much to say after the memories had been revisited with exaggerated enthusiasm. The friendships of decades ago sparked only briefly, sputtered in the absence of inflammable substance and then went back to being the cool acquaintance of ‘strangers.

‘Cant wait to see Z again… And ill never forgive u for doing this Peter!’ My classroom crush from 1978 displayed this status. Who was Z? Who was Peter and what had he done? I didn’t know. The missing apostrophes in ‘Cant’ and ‘ill’ troubled me. I had really liked this girl. But I couldn’t share her happiness. I didn’t even know if what she was communicating was happiness or irritation and perhaps even anger, but clearly many of her other 400 friends did, and they responded to her (‘U go girl!’).

Facebook kept telling me about her holidays, the excellent goings-on at the wedding of Anshu (who he?), her interests of the moment (‘Cant wait for desperate housewives dvd!’). The more detail Facebook gave me about her, the less I knew her. Almost from the moment after contact had been established, there had been nothing to say. At first there were some weak attempts at familiarity (‘Hi! Have a good weekend?’) and staying in touch. Then the on-screen silence between us, once sitting thigh-to-thigh in class, became longer. Meanwhile her life — pictures, status, Z, Peter — kept being updated. She was still next to me — at least her photograph was — but she was screaming (why don’t people use the exclamation mark sparingly?) things not aimed at me. I felt outdated, and occupied the silent corner, bearing only my memories of shared samosas. Nothing skewers the romance of nostalgia more thoroughly than contact with your past. Thanks a lot, Facebook.

Things were differently wrong on Facebook with those I actually knew and was familiar with. For instance relatives and friends of now. Many of them I meet once a month or so for an evening. Then we talk about our lives and our work and of the things that people of the city talk about. Which is primarily trying to convince the other about how bad our life is. Into this fairly uncomplicated exchange Facebook introduced the problem of excess data.

Not much is left to share when one knows what the other ate for breakfast (‘Only egg whites 2day, doc!’), has heard their opinion about the latest release (‘Ramu sucks!’) and which cricket team they support (‘Sachin, plz promote Kieron!’).

People you liked because you didn’t know enough about them to dislike them stand forever blemished by their status updates. Some of this Facebook allows you to switch off, such as their appalling friend feed, a tidal wave of banal information. But from other things there is no escape.

If someone is not added on as a friend, they know, unlike in life when you can unfriend someone without guilt or worry. An unaccepted invitation to join the ‘Ban Genetically Modified Food’ group is noticed. But accepting it means being made to read the passionately felt views of friends who will feel passionately about something else next week. They will ask you then to save the whales and demand that you turn your lights off on Monday to conserve power (switching off Facebook will also conserve power).

On Facebook, joining groups is meant to pass for meaningful activity and problem resolution. It is no such thing of course. Nothing real actually happens and communities cannot be built between strangers. But to accuse Facebookers of that is not to get into the sprit of Facebook. Social networking is described as a virtual world and things aren’t really supposed to happen in it. There is only the sharing of the trivial, which can get trying. This is compounded by the obligation to reply to what are, to me anyway, asinine inquiries. Not replying is a sort of statement in itself, and it can easily sour a relationship with an acquaintance.

Then there was a third group of people on Facebook who were problematic, and this is an Indian problem. People you work with should see you in a particular light. Europeans aren’t particularly bothered about this, but we Indians take our hypocrisy quite seriously. We cannot let people who work for us know too much.

If the problem of Facebook was too much information, the problem of Twitter was the lack of it. What was possible to say in 140 characters? And, more troublingly, why was it necessary to say it? This occurred to me almost immediately after I signed up and sent off my triumphal opening tweet (‘Am on twitter’). Now what? That answer did not come to me, though I made feeble attempts at trying to convince myself that it lay in soldiering on. And so for a few weeks I squirted my trimmed epigrams at the world. Or at the 32 people who constituted my world on Twitter. What would they have thought of me (‘Cooking steaks for dinner. Off to market’)? I feel there should be an option to correct and withdraw things said on social networking sites. A sort of admission of guilt, retraction and erasure of all the silliness broadcast, but that isn’t possible.

The problem of Twitter it seems to me is affecting even those who might have something meaningful to share, such as the rich and famous, whose doings interest millions. And yet a look at their Twitter account shows they’re also wearied by the pressure of feeding that hungry text field.

Salman Khan, a singularly charismatic individual, offers his 66,000 followers this word of advice: ‘Future depend on wat u hv dn in your past n wat u doing in your present, dnt wnt 2 hear that lst my job cs of tweeting or failed cs twtng sk’.

And this is the enigmatic Shah Rukh Khan: ‘asoka book yes, thanx/its ok if ppl let u down, their loss not urs/’.

Abhishek Bachchan makes an attempt at putting his glamorous life on display (‘@geneliad thank you my dear’ and ‘@realpreityzinta thanks Z!! Enjoy your dinner’) but the tedium is already showing: two exclamation marks is a certain sign.

The real problem is of course that of casual expression. Formal expression makes us civilised, but the world is being led by technology inexorably towards the puerile.

As an employer of young people, the company I work for regularly gets job applications written in abbreviations and breathing familiarity (‘u will b amzd at my abilitiz and cmmtmnt’). I try not to be repelled by this, but I fail and, before I throw the letter into the bin, I wonder if the person sending it has an idea of how these things are viewed by employers.

Facebook and Twitter and such things promote and spread this casual interaction between human beings and I predict it will get worse. I deleted my account, but clearly most people I know enjoy it. That depresses me.

The journalist Tunku Vardarajan wrote an excellent piece on Facebook in which he explained why it was so popular with Indians. We, he quoted a social scientist as saying, love sticking our nose into other people’s business, and telling the world what we are doing.

My partner, a very clever Sindhi with a cold view of the world, says that social networking sites may be divided in a Darwinian way. Facebook is for love (he used another word) and Linkedin is for money. That made things clear to me about why I had been useless at this. I was in the market for neither.

But to return to the piece by Varadarajan, it strikes me that even if I do not think I am inquisitive about the lives of others, it is true that I am inflicting myself on the world through this wonderful column in The News.

It strikes me also that it is often filled with the banal details of my life, and if this week’s has been particularly trying, I apologise and ask that you not unfriend me.

The writer is a director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com