Our celebration of the virtual world must be balanced by research into its psychological effects. A hundred visitors to an internet chatroom last month witnessed an English father of two hang himself in front of his webcam.

Some of Kevin Whitrick’s fellow chatters must have imagined he was play-acting, but others were happy to goad him into killing himself. As Whitrick’s face turned purple and he began to die, one chatter punctured the heady atmosphere by wondering: “Is this real?” Whitrick’s final moments tell us something important about what the internet has become.

In the course of the last decade, many of us have quit watching the box in the corner of the room and turned to fiddling around with gadgets through which we can watch each other instead. The web has morphed into a vast virtual suburbia to which many of us have retired to stare idly at each other’s lives.

To internet geeks this is known as “peer-to-peer” communication or “Web 2.0”; the rest of us could just as easily call it cyburbia. For millions, this online culture is the only culture that matters. Websites such as YouTube and MySpace have become pleasure parks.

From the people who Google themselves to those who stare at strangers on a webcam, there is good evidence that our time spent in cyburbia is less about “social networking” than about an obsessive desire to see and be seen. Where once we all wanted to see and be professional actors, sites like YouTube feed a newer fetish for amateurism - an anguished cry for authenticity in a superficial world.

Our celebration of life in cyburbia needs to be balanced with serious social investigation of what happens to people who spend so much time there. Why has there not been one? Odd that the same people who wax less than lyrically about the insidious machinations of our “mediated” universe turn silent when it comes to the mediation made by a computer.

The danger of life in cyburbia is that we don’t really get to know our neighbours. We risk huddling into small tribes defined by prejudices, urged on by the rhetorical anger of those who are never sure whether what they are so urgently participating in is entirely for real.