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Set researchers loose for three years on a study of young people's use of digital media, and don't be surprised when they claim to have discovered deep meaning in hours spent in semi-literate blather with friends or the playing of online games.

For instance, Toni, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States as a teenager, became “a technology expert” who “set up a small business selling Playboy pictures that he printed from library computers to his classmates,” according to a study by the U.S-based MacArthur Foundation. Imagine, it took only three years and 5,000 hours of interviews to turn up such inspiring entrepreneurship.

Most of the large claims that the researchers make have a similarly dubious quality. The researchers' “youth-centred focus” is the first clue that they checked their perspective in the hallway, before sitting down with the young people at their computers and video games. They allowed themselves to be captured by their subjects.

If only adults understood – or so the point seems to be – they would leave children and teens alone and let them do their own thing. “When technology is involved, it brings out all these anxieties for parents,” said Danah Boyd, one of the researchers. “It shouldn't. The Internet is where teens learn how the social world works.” Let's examine those two claims. That young people learn social etiquette on the Internet seems to be circular reasoning: Youth hang out online, so to learn to live among one's peers, one needs to be online.

As for parental anxieties, they are not just about bullying, sexual predators and addiction to games. Childhood and youth are fleeting, and parents naturally do not want to see 80 per cent of it disappear down into the black hole of online chatter.

Besides, at a certain point – after the first three hours a day? after 20 minutes? – there are diminishing returns in social and entrepreneurial skills, notwithstanding the occasional genius who emerges from the process. (For every Jim Carrey who watched a lot of television as a child and now makes $20-million a movie, there are approximately one million adult couch potatoes.) A researcher spent seven months playing the online game Final Fantasy XI, and discovered “a complex social organization” that gave the young an opportunity to “exercise adult-like agency and leadership.” A pick-up game of tackle football would do the same, while helping with the obesity epidemic.

Although the dangers are real, if not common, parents should not routinely intrude on their children's privacy. But the researchers do not seem to understand that parents still need to keep a watchful eye on their children's world.