A new study by one of the nation’s most esteemed universities finds that excessive use of the Internet turns normal, sociable and well-adjusted people into sullen, depressed, hollow-eyed loners. The technology companies that funded the study cast doubt upon the research, not upon their self-promoting assumptions.

As if withdrawing from family and friends for hours at a time, gluing oneself instead to a glowing monitor to carry out typed “conversations” with a distant computer operated by a person who may or may not be real should ever have been mistaken for real human contact. One would have to be pretty thick indeed to not see that the more one engages in this solitary activity the more isolated one becomes.

Or one would have to be an executive at Intel, Hewlitt Packard, AT&T Research, Apple or any of the other high-tech companies that bankrolled the two-year, $1.5 million Carnegie Mellon University study and that now are most unpleasantly surprised at the result.

If nothing else, this expression of surprise answers a lot of questions for those who wonder how it came to pass that, as 1998 wanes, no one knows what will happen to the world’s computer systems come the dawn of 2000. Clearly, being a forward-thinking futurist ain’t what it used to be.

Web surfing is a great way to get information. At its best, the Internet is the world’s biggest library, with a librarian who works at the speed of light to boot. But it’s no place to make a friend. At least the kind of friend you need when the situation requires a hug, a pat on the back or a set of jumper cables.

The problem with High Tech Inc. is that it believes its own advertising. It can’t be satisfied with making it possible for people, no matter how remote their town or poor their school, to tap into a mother lode of information or to communicate with someone in another hemisphere via e-mail. It has to change the world. It has to elicit wide-eyed wonder. Most of all, it has to be better than TV.

The computer is better than television. In the same way that a saxophone is better than a shovel. It sort of depends on what job needs doing. Yes, the Web itself is interactive, but surfing is a solo voyage. True, TV is a passive medium, but watching it can be a social event, complete with joking, chatter and snacks. At their best, the computer can make a lot of information available; TV (and other media) can sort it out and put it into context.

For educators and parents — who, after all, are the targets of the “log on or lose out” guilt trip the computer industry lays on — the Carnegie Mellon study teaches an important lesson. A Bangor sixth-grader who can point and click his or her way through the Library of Congress also should be able to contribute to a spirited classroom debate. An e-mail relationship with a sixth-grader in El Paso can be enlightening, but it’s no substitute for shooting hoops in the driveway with the neighbor kid. Before colleges and universities get too gung-ho about offering digital degrees, they should consider the educational value of a late-night bull session in the dorm.

It’s sad that the computer industry has such a hard time conceeding that absolutely everything about itself isn’t perfect, especially when there are some truly serious problems afoot: An Internet increasingly clogged with porn and hate; the Web’s commercial potential hobbled by consumer concerns about security and fraud; a generation of young hackers who believe wreaking digital havoc is sport; the unabated piracy of intellectual property, to name but a few. Why quibble about a few zombies when there are some real monsters on the loose?