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Once every so often, I log into Facebook and have a little Holden Caulfield moment. I picture myself writing a note to the world. “Dear everybody,” it would begin. “You're all a bunch of phonies!”

The thought comes to me as Facebook greets me with its trademark yard-long list of what my “friends” are up to. This canny innovation is part of what made Facebook the juggernaut that it is. There they are every day, people I know or knew or at some point pretended to know me, issuing forth with a thousand chipper pronouncements about what's on their mind.

Somebody is getting ready for yoga. Somebody just ate a fruit salad. Someone had a productive Saturday morning – yay! Somebody says they've overdosed on coffee, sweet coffee. Somebody is tired of 2009 already. Somebody has a brutish little cold.

Some of them are prosaic. Some are witty. Many of them, in fact, are too clever by half. Most of all, the residents of Facebook seem busy trying to strike the pose of droll irony that's dogged my generation for at least a decade.

I have no qualms with droll irony. Lord knows, it's all I've got going for me sometimes. But after a while, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that everybody on my Facebook list sounds more or less the same. Every status update, every comment, every little fart of consciousness that gets posted to that site sounds more or less like every other one: an attempt to look smart, sound detached, act aloof, as if life really were an endless series of caustic remarks and mild annoyances.

It's like being trapped in a nightmarish Oscar Wilde theme park, where everything is surface and snark and everybody has an animatronic smile fixed on their face. It's not what's said on Facebook that amazes me. It's what's left unsaid: Nobody is vulnerable or depressed. Nobody is on anti-depressants.

People don't usually broadcast their sorrow as their ambitions slip away, their health fails, their friendships falter and their relationships fail. (Facebook, at least, steps in and broadcasts that last one for them.) And sometimes, that disconnect from reality makes social websites seem like a foreign place indeed.

I raised these frustrations with friends at the pub. One of them has taken to Twitter, the site that works much like Facebook status updates (but without the rest of Facebook). It's the same story.

“Am I going to post, ‘Having panic attack in grocery story lineup'? ‘Preparing for a colonoscopy'? ‘Took an extra Ativan, had lunch with my mother'?” he said. “No! I'm in mixed company. Nobody wants to read that.”

“So instead,” he continued, “you write something like, ‘Feel effervescent about change of employment status.'” (In this instance, his employment status had recently changed from “some” to “none.”) He had a point. When people go negative on social-media sites, the reaction I've noticed isn't for others to rush to their sides in a show of solidarity, but instead to go suddenly quiet. Nobody likes a downer at the party. The fastest way to get zero reaction on a social site, is to post something needy.

It's not exactly a shocker. People want to look cool, like they would in any social setting. They call it “social media” for a reason. What was I expecting?

Well, if you buy the hype about the social Web, you might expect a lot more. The mythology that surrounds it suggests that it's brought out a new, oversharing strain of human, one that's given to parading around unself-conscious and uninhibited. To read the news, you'd think the Web was a psychic garden of Eden, in which people suddenly forgot the need for fig leaves.

The trend of watching other peoples' lives as seen through the prism of a thousand tiny updates gets a lot of flack for its seeming inanity. Newcomers marvel at who could be so self-absorbed as to write about what they had for lunch, and who could be pedantic enough to read it. Why, they ask, would anyone want to expose so many petty details to the public?

The answer, I think, is that online sharers aren't uninhibited; they're just canny, and eager to shape their public personas. By now, the majority of people who post on a social network know that they're performing in public, strutting on a grand promenade, and they style themselves accordingly. These details aren't inane – they're calculated.

That means that there are sharp limits on what's sayable, and what's not. We get stuck with these unwritten rules of conduct, just like there are rules in any public situation. Sometimes someone breaks the rules, and says something truly appalling, or something truly vulnerable, and it's a refreshing shock to the system. But for the most part, it's all so much preening.

So there, I said it. We're all a bunch of phonies. Don't let anyone tell you the Web is a window to anybody's soul. It's just vanity, reflecting a thousand flecks of light.