American youths now spend more time online than on the couch, according to a new study released Thursday by the Harris Interactive Poll.

The research revealed that people ages 13-24 spend an average of three more hours per week browsing the Internet than watching TV.

Conventional wisdom dictates that this is a positive development. Millions blame television for hurting inter-personal communication skills and dumbing us down.

But is the Internet any better? Eh. Maybe a little.

You burn slightly more calories sitting up at a computer desk compared to lying on a couch with a remote control. And all jokes aside, it's an interactive medium, demanding more thought than absorbing radiation from a television.

But the study brings to mind a scam my brother and I used to pull on our parents. Instead of washing the dishes after dinner, we'd claim "homework" had to be done. We'd then rush back to the computer and promptly turn on a video game.

We were playing into a flawed assumption on our parents' part: that a personal computer is inherently educational. But we knew the truth: Computers can be just as intellectually worthless as television, if not more.

If anything, the Internet's made buckling down more difficult for students. Procrastinators take advantage of instant messaging and e-mail to put off work for hours.

Members of the study's focus groups tend to use the Internet as a conversational tool with friends and even people they've never met.

But Frank Vespe, executive director of TV-Turnoff Network in Washington, D.C., says that's not necessarily an improvement. Instead of not having any sense of human interaction because of TV, some Web users develop a warped sense of it.

"If you go to message boards, there are people saying things they would never say in person," he says.

The Web gets credit for everything from helping pre-schoolers learn their ABCs to spreading democracy.

But remember, it's also given rise to spam e-mail and pointless Web sites that dumb down America worse than any TV show ever did.

--Ben Fischer