On Tuesday, the day after Americans completed their regular love affair with each other (I mean, of course, Monday-morning water cooler meetings, not Valentine's Day), new research from Stanford University cast a disheartening look on the lives of the modern wired citizen. Fortunately for all of us, their findings were, in a word, wrong.

Stanford's Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society has an impressive leadership pedigree. Its director, Prof. Norman Nie, used to head the political science department at the U. of Chicago, and was co-founder/CEO of SPSS, one of the world's leading makers of statistics software. This makes the misguided nature of the IQSS findings all the more surprising.

For those who were unlucky enough to miss hearing the results (unlucky because they were so funny), a brief retelling is in order. IQSS surveyed 4,113 people on their Internet usage; keep in mind that this country's Internet population totals between 65 and 100 million. The detailed version of the press release from Stanford indicates, among other things, that 'while one in five [I]nternet users claim to have used chat rooms, this activity almost completely ceases by age 30,' and that people using the Internet ten hours a week or more report a 65 percent decrease in the use of traditional media.

What little data that has been released publicly thus far provides little explanation of these age issues. If people stop chatting after age 30, what do they do? Is there some sort of center in the brain dedicated to processing interactions that atrophies during someone's 30th birthday party? Census data indicates that there are over 85 million Americans between ages 30 and 50. The IQSS study talked to 2,000 of them. It seems very hard, on face, to uphold the over-30-no-chat claim.

The study also makes quite a big deal about the overwhelming use of email. The data shows that 84 percent of the study respondents use email on a regular basis. Nie cites this as a problem. The question is whether or not email can rightly be accused of destroying interaction when people who live three weeks apart by paper mail can contact each other every five minutes electronically. Email only bridges gaps. Time was people who otherwise had positive, interactive relationships would not contact each other because the distance was too far to travel and the communication gap was too wide. They were not accused of isolating themselves, as Dr. Nie does to frequent Net users. Instead, they were prevented by physical limitations from staying in contact. Those barriers are gone, and all things being equal, that should be something to be celebrated.

Dr. Nie told the Washington Post yesterday: 'We're moving from a world in which you know all your neighbors, see all your friends, interact with lots of different people every day, to a functional world, where interaction takes place at a distance. Can you get a hug, a warm voice, over the Internet?'

Yes, Dr. Nie, you can. Maybe not the hug part, but it can't be far off. The warmly-voiced conversations, and similarly friendly exchanges, are constantly occuring in myriad online communities. The nature of the beast is such that the Internet is a transactional entity, and as Web technology improves and people get faster connections at home (DSL, cable modems, etc.), real-time streaming audio and video are becoming commonplace.

And lest the concerned folks at IQSS lose sleep over the decline of print readership, let me reassure them that all is well in the land of paper-and-ink. While we online journalists toil away at our keyboards and PDAs, trying to keep up with the standard online deadline (i.e. five minutes ago), the newspaper business remains rather healthy, with the statistics indicating that the online world is not stealing away people who like the smell of newsprint in the morning. Granted, these are industry figures, but there is still at least a major grain of truth to them. Print is thriving, either because of or in spite of online media (depends on who you ask).

The world of statistics can often be confusing. Statisticians are an exacting bunch, and when someone goes public in a major way with quantitative data, he or she can expect all manner of scrutiny. This morning, in an AP article on Fox News, Howard Fienberg of the D.C.-based Statistical Assessment Service says, 'presenting [the study] as a scientific study is a bit of a reach. [Nie's study is] preliminary work and it doesn't tell us much.'

And no, SAS is not some Internet industry patsy, formed to be a warehouse for number-crunching network apologists. In fact, it may have a better pedigree than IQSS. Its advisory board has a ridiculous amount of brainpower - it should almost be criminal. And in the same article that quoted Dr. Fienberg, author and Internet expert Jakob Nielsen criticizes the study for overlimiting the definition of human contact to exclude such Internet pursuits as chat rooms and e-mail. How Dr. Nie could possibly justify this exclusion is beyond the range of explanation.

A look at the study's charts shows some interesting things that are missed in the overall picture. For one, it appears that most of the people in Dr. Nie's sample used the Internet for very productive purposes. Would Dr. Nie prefer that people leave their home, and take time off work (time off that would likely cost people money, in lost salary), to go running around in traffic for plane tickets, insurance quotes, bank transactions, and the like? Does he own stock in something that we should know about, like GM or Exxon? His co-investigator, Lutz Erbing of the Free University of Berlin, told C|Net|told C|Net, 'Those who use the Internet also report spending fewer hours caught in traffic, fewer hours in shopping malls.' This is a bad thing?

For someone who knows what they are looking at, the demographic data doesn't look too good either. Almost 77 percent of the respondents were white. Over 50 percent of the respondents had a high school education or less. More than 40 percent of the respondents were between 31-50, not exactly an Internet generation.

The methodology used to select the same population also raises troubling questions. The survey firm IQSS used is an outfit called InterSurvey. Guess who co-founded InterSurvey? And guess what university invests in the board of InterSurvey? And while you're doing all this guessing, take a shot at which university's business school has agreements to use InterSurvey for research. The answers, in order: Nie, Stanford, and Stanford Business School (but you knew that already). InterSurvey got the respondents for this survey from a pool of 35,000 panelists it already has under its umbrella. These 35,000 people were provided with Web TV equipment by InterSurvey, which pays for their Internet connections. Nie et al used newly participating homes to distinguish old from new Internet users.

So, in summary: an institute at Stanford ran a study, using a company partly owned by the university and founded by the study's principal investigator, a company which builds its own pool of respondents by paying for them to have the technology the institute says is changing their lives. If I had done something like this in the research methodolgy class I took in school, I probably would be sentenced to six months of breaking rocks in an academic prison somewhere. Unfortunately, it's all too common these days. This chain is more questionable than outright wrong. It casts a cloud over the research, but to be fair, it does not discredit the study.

However, what makes the questionable nature of this chain amusing is that, in the Stanford press release, Dr. Nie goes on a rant about the Interne eroding business ethics, saying: 'When we lived in small communities, the old story was that you said to yourself, 'I'll see this guy and his wife at church on Sunday, so I better be honest with him today.' Then we moved to the big anonymous cities and it became, 'Hell, I'll hardly ever see this guy.' Now, it's becoming, 'Hell, I won't ever even know this guy's name.'' If ever there were an illustration of the pot calling the kettle black, this is it. It's do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do all over again. Maybe Dr. Nie's ethics problems come from the fact that he is a confessed Net junkie.

The only thing in this whole mess that is more troubling than the study itself is the way it has been handled by the media. Most Internet-saavy folks recall the Great Internet Porn Scare of 1995. In short, a fellow named Marty Rimm, an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University, published a study that purported to prove that the Internet is a filthy network of pornography. Rimm's study was, of course, absolutely debunked by academics, but that didn't stop the press from milking the story for all it was worth.

Time ran a now-legendary cover that scared America into thinking that our youth were being corrupted by the Internet. This panic was in large part responsible for inspiring Sen. James Exon (R-Neb.) to write every Net-head's favorite bill, the Communications Decency Act.

The Washington Post parked the story of the IQSS study on page A1 yesterday, with a lead that reads: 'The Internet is creating a class of people who spend more hours at the office, work still more hours from home, and are so solitary they can hardly be bothered to call Mom on her birthday.' Not until the second paragraph does the Post explain that this is the conclusion of a study. CBS News did a piece on the study. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on the cover of Wednesday's business section. Not to be outdone, The New York Times weighed in as well. It's good that the Grey Lady did a story, since the company has very publicly announced that it will offer a tracking stock, Times Company Digital, for its Web properties. One of the most critical pieces on the study came out of - surprise - Wired.

Bottom line: this study was wrong. The Internet is not destroying American society. It is enriching the society for so many groups in so many ways that sociologists are giddy with the prospect of all the research opportunities. It is a social network that makes people's lives easier and gives them greater access to friends, family, and perfect strangers whose lives and stories interest them. Sure there are problems. I myself am guilty of e-mailing a question to someone who is sitting literally five feet away, when I could just as easily ask them the question outloud. Some people do appear to have problems. Psychologists have reported seeing people who have anti-social disorders because they spend all their time online. There are verified cases in which use of the Internet to exclusion of all else (sometimes called 'Internet addiction') has destroyed peoples lives. Although, use of anything to exclusion of all else can have a detrimental impact on one's life. However, these cases are (relatively) few and far between. They are a the exception, rather than the rule, and there is no evidence to indicate that there is a developing trend toward such behavior.

Dr. Nie may be a Net-aholic, but he's shown that he still has much to learn about life on the Internet.