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MySpace, with close to 50m registered members worldwide, receives more hits than Google in America. In December, the proportion of UK 15- to 22-year-olds visiting MySpace was higher than any other networking brand, NetRatings reports. Indeed, member community sites now attract half the UK net population every month. To pay their way, all the networks rely on targeted banner advertising. On the back of this enormous burst of youthful nectar for advertisers, News Corporation — parent company of The Sunday Times — bought Intermix Media last year, principally for the jewel in its crown, MySpace, which was then scarcely two years old.

At aSmallWorld, the web’s most exclusive club, membership is by invitation only, from “trusted” members with benchmark kudos. Even the adverts are posh (islands for sale in Connecticut) and messages revolve round elite guest lists or expensive trips. Once through the door, mutual esteem is effectively assured.

“One trader I didn’t know wrote asking me to go to Paris,” says member Eve Scrivener, 26, an equity trader in the City, who declined the offer. “I had a month’s gardening leave from work and posted a request asking if anyone could recommend a good health spa. I went to Chiva-Som, in Thailand, on members’ advice.”

For Britain’s students, Facebook has replaced the common room as the dating, gossiping and procrastinating hot spot.

“It does run my life,” says Sian Davies, 19, a first-year student at Oxford University, who has 203 friends listed on her Facebook page. “I check it at least once a day. If you’ve got an essay crisis, you might find yourself spending two hours looking at people’s photos. It’s easier and cheaper than texting or calling, so a lot of nights out get organised that way.”

Stuffed full of photos of drunken high jinks, Facebook pages are visible only to people from the same university, unless they are invited to join the network of a friend at another university. While that may keep parents in the dark, it doesn’t stop tutors and supervisors seeing.

“People can reveal really quite humiliating things, such as, ‘I can’t believe you pulled so-and-so’,” Davies says. “You can come back from a night out and three people will have put up new photos.” The craze for viewing explicit profiles, often containing addresses, phone numbers, hobbies, relationship status and political allegiance, has been dubbed “legal stalkerishness” by one student.

The perceived anonymity of these online networks tends to reduce inhibitions as quickly as that first swig or three of cider in the park. “People are far more outgoing, revealing and fearless of what people might think of them,” Reddy says. “They feel free of social constraints.”

Such licence means many home pages end up as spleen-venting soapboxes that are no-go areas for parents. Members go by names such as Splif11 and DrSpank, and often spout an inventive stream of expletives. RocknRoll Princess, on her Bebo home page, lists among her dislikes “cocky ‘Bad’ tanned boys with six-packs who think they’re the best thing since toilets that flush”.

Question marks also hang over the validity of cyber relationships compared with the real world. “The internet is an astounding advance in connectivity that also has an isolating effect,” Reddy says. “Relationships tend to be built much more securely face to face.” He concedes that the babble of always-on techno- logies, alleged in a study published last year to do more harm to youthful IQs than smoking marijuana, is creating patterns of compulsive behaviour.

“I just sit here doing just about nothing talking to everyone about random things,” writes *K8* Neonpink on her MySpace, decorated with a personalised backdrop of pink Love Hearts sweets. “Im here on MySpace for the only reason being that im an online profile ADDICT!! hehe. i really dont want to make any more ... but if people tell me or show me theirs... then it just makes me have to make one too!! GRR hehe.”

The American e-learning guru Marc Prensky believes the thinking patterns of those he terms “digital natives”, who have been “networked most or all of their lives”, are fundamentally different from those of older generations, who are obliged to become “digital immigrants”. He cites a child at kindergarten, keen to eat at lunchtime, who simply said “ www.hungry.com”, and a US high-school student talking of having to “power down” when he attended school.

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