If an Emily Post existed for the digital age, she would surely have to entertain a steady stream of questions about internet etiquette.

Emily Post, from a painting of her as a teenage Baltimore debutante, circa 1891. (Alden Pellett/Associated Press)

For instance, one I heard the other day: is it right for a student to text message a fellow student with important information (I am going to move out of your apartment!) when you could just walk down the hall and tell it to that person, face to face?

Who doesn't have such minor horror stories of digital decorum? Are these stories overblown, produced from the overworked factories of New Media Angst Inc.?

Well, yes, according to a new study funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

I quote from the press release: "Results from the most extensive U.S. study on teens and their use of digital media show that America's youth are developing social and technical skills online-often in ways adults don't understand or value."

According to Mizuko Ito, the report's lead researcher, "there are myths about kids spending time online — that it is dangerous or making them lazy."

"But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age."

Apply critical thinking

Of course, there have always been people who were ill mannered and did the wrong thing at the wrong time, face to face or otherwise. That's why Emily Post and other advice columnists flourished in an earlier print age.

I like to be consoled that etiquette today, whether digital or in the so-called real world, is not as bad as the occasional story or anecdote makes it out to be. After all, all the scientific types tell me that stories themselves, the font of journalism and gossip, are fundamentally untruthful, statistically speaking.

Furthermore, my colleagues down the hall at CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks tell me to beware of studies. Apply "critical thinking," they say. Find out how the study was done, who did it and according to what procedures.

Now, it may be really hard for a non-scientific fellow like me to devote myself to the mysteries of scientific protocols. But perhaps not in the case of this particular MacArthur Foundation report.

How to sell

True, lots of money and time were spent: 28 researchers interviewed 800 young people and their parents, face to face and in focus groups. In addition, these researchers spent over 5,000 hours observing teens online, interacting with Facebook, YouTube and other, what are called networked communities.

These researchers discovered all sorts of good things were happening. But it doesn't take long to realize that these researchers were looking for answers they wanted to find.

If you go to the project's website, Digital Youth, you find that the project started with three general objectives.

The first is to describe "kids as active innovators" rather than "passive consumers of popular culture." The second is to "engage in a dialogue" with educational planners about what kids are doing. And the third (the whammy) is to "advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software."

In other words, advise software planners how to devise and sell better products to this ready and expanding market.

A study with these objectives will hardly come up with anything negative. If I were given these instructions, I wouldn't either.

Drifting apart

Still, there are plenty of studies that suggest the possible downsides of our digital future, how it subverts any sense of real, felt community and how it isolates the user.

That's what two Harvard psychiatrists, Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, tell us in their book, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.

Now, it must be said, psychiatrists, being doctors, also have their biases. First among them is that they are trained to find pathologies. They see patients who "present" symptoms and diagnose their disorders.

So it's not usual if they see the underside of the digital revolution in the increase in depression and distress on college campuses and in society in general.

In their book, Olds and Schwartz tell the story of Jeff, a psychiatrist in his early 30s who began to explore the world of Facebook. He described the experience as "really intense" but also "superficial." It was the juxtaposition of these two words, intense and superficial, that caught their psychiatric interest.

What stands out for the authors is the "important paradox of digital communications." On one hand, Jeff is suddenly "back in touch." That was intense.

But he also began to discover he was playing out "personal dramas on a public stage with an audience looking on, some of them unknowable lurkers."

Like porno

Olds and Schwartz suggest that this dichotomy resembles the experience of pornography, which they remind us, is the real cash cow of the worldwide web, with its 60,000 porno sites.

When a user visits a porno site, a "curious double effect" takes place. Users feel the paradoxical effect of "connection and aloneness." They participate in an intimate act with an imaginary other in the most solitary way possible.

The users' experience of pornography "eases their loneliness even as it leaves them feeling more alone."

This was the same feeling Jeff felt when he performed on Facebook: it was an intense if superficial experience that left him a little bereft afterwards.

The lonely web

Add to this the stunning range of choice in our new digital landscape. The Harvard doctors give us two intriguing bits of information: customers of online dating services go out with fewer than one per cent of the people whose profiles they study.

On the other hand, speed-daters, who meet their prospective dates face to face, go out with one in 10.

Olds and Schwartz say there many be multiple reasons for this. As "loneliness experts," they acknowledge that online dating has been a boon to some of their loneliest patients.

But they say that, in the end, the new technology turns people into restless customers who are always cruising for a better deal.

And abundant choice, as the psychologist Barry Schwartz tells us, makes for misery.

Combine this frenzied consumerism with the disembodied quality of relationships on the web: we want so much from it and yet it can prevent us from being there, in real life, for others or even ourselves.

Consumption is one thing. Human connection is another. It may be that with newer "embodied software" human beings will delight in a virtual world that is just as solid and tangible as our natural one.

As in Star Trek, people will conjure each other up as sparkling holograms, simulacrums of a new digital reality.

Or, we might find ourselves made ravenous and diminished by a technology that whets our appetite and, like pornography, fails to deliver what we really need.