It's a brave new world out there in cyberspace. Many teenagers have got there first, colonising it and discovering whole new means of communication.With a little care, it is nothing to be afraid of Kathryn Holmquist

In the 1950s and 1960s, teen life was represented by the beach party movie, where surfer dudes showed off their skills to admiring girls, who were expected to pose prettily on the shore and discuss their emotional entanglements with the boys. And you know what? Modern teen surfers aren't that different. Their secret cyberworld has been revealed as a rich and complex place by researchers who have observed teen web-surfing habits in the classroom and at home.

Boys still like to talk about "boy" stuff. On the cyberbeach, they seek out other boys with common interests - such as sports. They e-mail their heroes and often receive responses back. For a boy to gain prestige in a chatroom, he will often say that he is older than he actually is (18 rather than 15) and will claim to come from a place that seems really interesting, rather than his own boring community. Sounds like a beach movie to me.

Girls are not allowed in on boy conversations, even if they are interested in sports. Their level of discourse is more emotional and intimate. Nor are boys allowed in on female talk - unless they pretend to be girls.

In their book, Cyberkids: children in the information age, Sarah L Holloway and Gill Valentine, both academics at British universities, chart the geography of children's cyberworlds. They show that the cybergeographic world of e-mail and chatrooms almost perfectly mirrors the real world.

They regard it as ironic that, despite the fact that one of the main uses of ICT is for communication, parents sometimes regard it as the anti-social refuge of geeks and loners. Actually, on-line activities are both social and "public", binding young people together in off-line space. Children of separated parents, for example, often use e-mail to keep in daily touch with parents who live far away.

Intellectually, children move beyond the limitations of their immediate educational environment as they access information from centres of academic excellence. In classrooms, young people report successfully dealing with bullies using e-mail across a crowded room. Young people in rural areas find that the Internet expands their social world, helping them to find other young people with common interests, and freeing them from a community limited only to those in their immediate, physical community. Often, young people go on to meet their new friends in the real world.

Instead of shunning society, young people who communicate with a wider world via computer are actively seeking it.

But just as teens engage in many positive behaviours, there are negative behaviours too, and these can cause concern. Just as the surfer boy on the California beach could go "too far" and sexually harass his female friends, on the cyberbeach some boys may do the same.

In one school, boys put "glamour" pictures of nude women on their screens in order to discomfit their female classmates. (The boys couldn't access pornography because of the screening programmes on the school computers.) The girls reacted with disgust, calling their male classmates "creeps" and "perverts". Holloway and Valentine point out that it wasn't the computer causing this behaviour; the young people were merely reproducing the behaviour of the schoolyard on their screens.

It is important for parents to think positively about their children's cybergeography, but, as with anything else, parents need to be vigilant to the possibilities of sexual exploitation and inappropriate conversation.

Your child's world of "rooms" on the Internet is not a private diary. It is a public document. Parents have every right to keep an eye on what is going on. If, as a parent, you feel inadequate to the task of protecting your child - seek technical support. Make sure you know as much about the cyberworld as your child does, and that you can track your child's engagement with it.