Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, in a message to the national youth movement, said young Singaporeans needed to be aware of the republic's fight to survive as a prosperous society in a turbulent region.

"Youths are spending more time sitting in front of computers, surfing the Net and communicating through emails, ICQ and SMS," Lee said in a speech late Friday (Dec 29).

"You must also grow up sharing common formative experiences in the real world, and bond together as a people. You can only do this through face-to-face interaction," he said.

"As a nation we cannot afford to let ourselves drift off individually, to become disembodied, faceless entities in remote corners of cyberspace."

Singapore has undergone a meteoric rise in its brief history, being transformed from a tropical backwater with no resources into one of the world's wealthiest nations per head of capita in three decades.

Telling the nation's youth that "the Internet is not the only reality in your lives," Lee said they needed to understand the backdrop against which Singapore "has to fight to survive including how we made it to where we are today."

"They should be exposed to the cultural and society diversity in and outside Singapore, so that they acquire the instincts and knowledge they need to live in a multi-racial society that is located in a turbulent region within a globalised world."

Affluent Singapore has been actively promoting an electronic lifestyle among its four million residents, with a mid-year survey showing 60 percent of homes have at least one computer and most have Internet access.

A poll of 4000 teenagers showed they spent on average more than 13 hours on line per month.

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