THE internet: friend or enemy of the Gospel? I would like to offer a theological take on the question put by AOL’s recent TV adverts. At first these exposed the dark side of the web and then, minutes later, they sang its praises.

Both the question, posed as a religious conundrum, and the equivocacy of its secular counterpart miss the point, to my mind. For surely the internet is morally neutral; it is we, the users, who turn it into a friend or foe.

I made my first computer in my twenties — a primitive card index system with punched holes and a knitting needle. I have been obsessed with the idea of information management ever since. I prefer simple systems, believing they mirror back to me something of the simplicity of the mind of God, and so something of the workings of my own mind, made in that image. I like systems that enhance human communication. For they too teach me something about a Trinitarian God and the need we have to echo the communications at the heart of the Godhead in our own human discourse.

Thinking about the internet in this way enables me to cut to the chase and ask what is at stake when we think about life in cyberspace. Of course there are moral questions to be asked and an ethic to be developed, but why waste time on the wrong questions? The really valuable ones are surely about discernment and how it can be applied when we go online.

There is a clue: the internet is a relatively new medium. No more and certainly no less than that. So the wisdom we have been learning ever since the monks first began to copy manuscripts, and printing presses started to turn out books, can be applied to this medium too. Ditto with television and radio.

I cannot have been alone in registering shock at the results of a survey published earlier this month. It revealed that eight out of ten teenagers have a television in their bedrooms. Teachers complain that the children in their classes yawn through their morning lessons because they have been up so late watching the box.

That surely is an abuse of the medium — a human error rather than an inherent evil of television itself. So there are questions about choice to be addressed and questions about our use of time. You would have thought that with so many hours of radio listening under our belts we would be better able to tell the good from the indifferent. Radio is delightful, largely because listening is a secondary activity. You can do it while cooking or ironing or driving the car. You can listen through the long watches of the night. What you learn is how to switch on and also how to switch off. News and current affairs, as well as human stories are firm favourites with listeners and we expect them to be both accurate and up-to-date.

That is what the monks were teaching us as they illuminated their sacred scriptures; that is what the early Protestants were up to when they tried to illuminate the human heart with versions of the Bible in the vernacular.

At present the internet is the last in a long line. As a medium, it seeks to empower because it dispenses information: and it is up to us to insist that this information be accurate. It seeks to build lines of communication through the ether: and it is up to us to ensure that the talking we do online and in our e-mails is charitable and true.

“A sower went out to sow,” we read in the Gospels. He took the risk of broadcasting, of throwing the seed high up in the air so that it landed in places where it could not flourish, or the birds might gobble it up, or it might thrive and yield a hundredfold. He was not a nervous, edgy character; he did not narrowcast, concerned only with the purity of the few.

Does this explain the endorsement given by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications in 2002? “The Church’s approach to the means of social communication is fundamentally positive, encouraging. It does not simply stand in judgment and condemn; rather it considers these instruments to be not only products of human genius but also great gifts of God and true signs of the times.” Amen to that.

Dr Lavinia Byrne reviews the internet for The Tablet.