A friend’s white haired relative posted something so risqué as her Facebook status we were wobbling around the house for hours wondering what’d hit us. See that’s the problem with older people using social networking (mind you there was a comment on my wall once saying ‘what’s an aunty like you doing on Facebook?!’ the total berk)... they love the interaction, but cannot get their heads around the privacy settings.

Now I tell you, would you open your front door with a flourish to guests dressed in a very little something? You, that is, not them. Even the suggestion is scary, but it’s totally like that, this little white haired we thought shareef grandma saying what she did, which, if quoted here would cause my editor to have a large litter of kittens.

There may be four dimensions, but don’t let anyone forget Facebook, the fifth, in which people morph into something totally different, with fangs.

Yes we have taken to social networking, Facebook, Twitter, etc, like ants to halwa in Pakistan, a place where we appreciate the importance of contacts, because nothing is achieved sans connections here, not even justice.

It is as Einstein said, ‘confusion of goals and perfection of means seems to characterise our age.’ Networking sites have given us the means to build contacts, aka friends in ‘FBspeak’, but does anyone know where to draw the line?

It has been said that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and anything more is a congress, and the average Facebook user’s contact list reads like a congressional attendance roll call. Anyone and everyone, your local dumb blonde, your family ‘s masi museebatay, your neighbourhood pick pocket… they’re all there. An average teenager has thousands of contacts. Even some adults possess as many.

Like a blogger says, “I am thinking about Facebook and the new, deeper connection that I immediately feel to everyone I know. It’s so deep, so rich and personal and dare I say, intimate, that the effect is almost overwhelming. It’s like Stendhal Syndrome, where you get overwhelmed by looking at a work of art. I am shellshocked. No, even that is too small a word. I sit and gaze upon the Facebook home page and my emotions begin to sweep and swirl. One moment I am elated. Then I’m struck by anxiety and panic, and want to hide under my desk. A minute later I’m sobbing, uncontrollably, at the beauty of what they’ve done. Why, Mark Zuckerberg? Why do you do this to me? To the world? You are not a businessman, not a geek, not an engineer — you are an artist, and your canvas is the human race itself, the collective hive-mind of modernity.”

Is it possible to have any meaningful interaction with an entire bazaar? Not unless you have aspirations to be a rabble rouser or a mullah. In fact, there is such a thing as a ‘Dunbar's number’, which can be defined as the outer limit to the number of people with whom an individual can have meaningful contact, the people that an individual personally knows, and with whom he relates, and interacts. This number is said to be approximately 150.

Social networks function much like personal interaction in some ways: you invite a person to be a ‘friend’, or someone invites you, and you accept or not, as appropriate. We end up with, simultaneously on the same page, a post about why it is haram to eat a French fry with your left hand, standing on one leg next to a camel (just an example, they’re quite similar to this), and another a video of guys singing ‘Meri maa nay pakaye aloo anday!’

In between the whimsical posts of a young relative desperate to come out of the closet, and of course another verbal blast from the same old lady under an album of wedding photographs, asking the groom, ‘Are you okay?’ Is anyone prepared for this? The groom of course goes around wildly blocking dadijan, but he’s too late and has been heard to complain that he can’t get his wife to be still for a minute, she’s too busy laughing. He’s lucky she has a sense of humour.

Not everyone appreciates the sonorous properties of e-dialogue. There have been divorces because a husband posted on his wife’s page a comic strip she thought hit on her weight; she wrote back saying she was sick of his sarcasm, and then she unfriended him. What is unfriending, but an e-divorce?

Gauche friends add you to groups you don’t wish to be in, tag your name onto Firdous Ashiq Awan’s picture, or post that shot of you picking your nose on the front cover of a photo album. Someone may discover that that new ‘friend’, who looks like Johnny Depp, only better, actually stole the picture and falls drastically short in fact. So how do you drop persons from your list?

It isn’t easy when people for some reason feel moved to post their every thought and act online. When, having informed the person you wish to unfriend that you’ve been too busy to reply to her messages, you’re caught because you’ve just updated your status with: ‘Spent half an hour in a staring match with my goldfish... and I won! Hurray!!’

Mark Twain said, it is ‘better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.’ Mark Twain, the dear man, is so often right.