An astonishing number of news outlets have reported that poor Ashleigh Hall (above) "met" her rapist and murderer Peter Chapman on a social networking site. It's rather like saying that you "met" someone by letter, "met" them on the telephone, or "met" them by carrier pigeon. Had the teenager "met" the serial sex offender only on the internet, then she would not have suffered her terrible fate.

This might seem like a petty semantic point, but as discussion rages about how to make social networking sites more safe, it might be worth looking at the language used to describe virtual encounters. When the BBC, for example, accepts that a social networking contact is someone that you have "met", what's to stop an impressionable young girl from presuming that she already knows a person she has never, in fact, "met".

Electronic contacts are not meetings, and they should not routinely be described as if they are. This idea that you can meet people via a machine is a fantasy, perhaps for most people a harmless one. But some people's fantasies are very dark indeed, which is why this collective fantasy of virtual "meeting" should not be pandered to.