ARE you a cyber-friend? Do you have a web-buddy out there with whom to exchange your virtual secrets?

Not since the invention of the telephone has anything had such an impact on instant communication as the World Wide Web. It’s a friend, a vital tool, a demon. Commerce, security, all depend on its speedy information gathering.

The dot.com revolution has effectively shrunk the planet. Indeed, temporarily exiled among the vignes of Côte de Blaye, I would be at a total loss for local information if I were unable to summon up wwwthisisjersey.com before spinning my thoughts to you. But – and there is a big but – beware gigabytes bearing gifts. Virtual living is deceiving. It allows you to create your own universe where there is no pain, you are never countermanded and your wishes are supreme.

Grand Theft Auto IV, the computer game which has outstripped even the fantasy extremes of Hollywood, promises to ‘give you control’ of whatever PC-based role-play the IT wizards have devised. It offers a cocktail of violence with ‘morality choices’.

Psychologists might call it ‘empowerment’; in my opinion, whether this represents escapism or the opportunity to acquire awareness skills, such experience risks a dangerous confusion between parallel realities.

An Ofcom study released back in April paints a disturbing picture about the vulnerability of young subscribers to social networking. Many eight- to 11-year-olds regularly bypass age restrictions to access adult websites.

And perversely, while the risk-averse groups prevent youngsters from going out to play or undertaking pursuits, even in the school environment, which might involve minimal hazard, they turn a blind eye to the horrors lurking at the other end of a computer link.

Truth is, children are far more savvy about the internet than their elders; they are more likely to set their privacy settings low, and as a result are more prepared to go public with information exchange.

One fifth of adults with internet access use social networking to keep up with friends they already know, whereas an estimated 60 per cent of kids tend to use the facility to make new friends. Forty per cent are thought to use an ‘open access’ so that anyone can enter their site. They feel far more liberated by the keyboard than by face-to-face contact. Perhaps they haven’t thought what it would be like to display all their personal details on a banner suspended from a flagpole in their front garden!

We are all familiar with the galaxy of YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace – even Saga for the over-50s, but are we aware of all the pitfalls of entering into the virtual space race? For example, you might think twice about posting anything about yourself on a public site if you realised all the entries it contained about pretty well any individual or subject were unsupervised; where anything can be added by another subscriber or edited anonymously.

Having let the entire world into your life, what happens when you want to retreat from the virtual back into the real? Though you might delete your own profile, what about all those who have got you on their ‘friends’ list? Once you’re in, your digital fingerprint is everywhere and almost impossible to erase.

The moral of the story is: don’t give out anything you don’t want others to use – ever. Don’t get trapped in a tangled web.

Now we have Blogosphere, a cyber-atmosphere of chat and information. The blog gives just as much broadcast expression to the astute as to the idiot, where opinions rather than judgments rule. There are apparently 112 million blogs out there, judicious or shrill: the choice is yours.

This Blogosphere is capable of being tapped into as much by enthusiastic babblers as governments, pressure groups and international companies. They have exploited the opportunity to flog their ideas or products by posting pseudo praise blogs; they have even got people known as ‘shadow bloggers’ to write the testimonials –the ghost writers of cyber-space.

This blogger’s paradise allows cowards to hide behind the keyboard, to exchange lurid accounts of anti-social exploits or behaviour, dismiss employees, break off relationships, abuse anyone from neighbours to media celebrities and, more worryingly, to lure the young and vulnerable into chat rooms and worse.

Then there’s the technical downside. Scarily, fraudsters scammed off £500 million last year from internet subscribers without effective virus protection.

Then there are other, as yet unexplained, phenomena. If you recall movies like Entrapment or Mission Impossible, in which unseen electro-magnetic beams criss-crossed open space to form barriers or triggers, who knows whether the dwindling bee population or flocks of migrating birds flying off-course can be directly related to their unwittingly encountering a virtual pea-souper of electronic buzz?

I suppose you know something has really arrived when measures are called for to regulate it – cinema-style ratings for computer games, data protection warnings about potential employers trawling sites to check the legitimacy and reliability of job applicants.

Every country monitors the use of the internet. The Chinese blatantly interfered with on-line connections during the Beijing Olympic Games and continue to blank access by their own citizens. It’s the clumsy ones who are found out.

But if you needed a more potent example of the influence of the net, cast your mind back to the saga of the ‘bale-out bill’ in the United States. The State Department website was hit with four times its normal traffic from lobbying citizens. They nearly forced the net into meltdown, just like the international financial system they were all logging in about.

So, have we a powerful tool for democracy. or an electronic Swiss Army knife with the ability to maim as effectively as it facilitates and liberates? The answer, my friends, is in the hands of virtually anyone who uses it.