In one version of the future, the Internet is us.

No more desktop computers. The chips and screens are inside our skulls.

Eye movements flick that little pointer thing around the screen. E-mail is neurotransmitted in and out at the speed of thought.

No more face time, phone time or fax time. We’re online all the time. Welcome to Cyborg City.

But just a minute. Hold on. We’re not there yet. College kids prefer face-to-face and phone conversation to e-mail. That’s the finding of a recently conducted study of 500 Kansas University undergraduates.

The students filled out a questionnaire for Nancy Baym, a KU associate professor of communications. One part asked them to report about a recent and significant online, face-to-face or phone contact they’d had with an acquaintance, a friend, a family member or romantic partner. Baym asked the students to rate the quality of the exchange. Was it interesting or boring? Intimate or distant? Satisfying or dissatisfying? Pleasant or unpleasant?

She reported, “The results of this part of our survey showed that the telephone provides a higher-quality exchange than either face-to-face or Internet contact.”

Part of what makes the phone better is that people use it to talk to those with whom they have a closer relationship, Baym says.

In face-to-face meetings or on-line, they’re more likely to talk to acquaintances. And according to the survey, acquaintances are the lowest-quality relationships.

On the other hand, the highest quality relationships were with family and friends. Romantic partnerships finished third.

In another part of the written survey, Baym asked students open-ended questions about such matters as how they used the three medium in their social life. Here, many students consistently ranked face-to-face contact first, the telephone second and the Internet third.

Finally, Baym conducted open-ended interviews with about 28 of the 500 students. She turned up a dazzling range of uses for the Internet.

One couple, for example, who see each other only on weekends, talk about their feelings by e-mail but not face to face. They’ve been together four years.

One student uses the Internet only to play an interactive computer game that involves thousands of other people.

Some students instant-message friends who live in the next room.

Baym said, “One guy uses the Internet to chat a little with someone to see whether he wants to ask her out. Once he determines that he likes the person, he never uses e-mail again.”

In sum, Baym doesn’t think that e-mail is taking the place of face time.

“All of the media work together to form relationships,” she says.

What the Web is affecting is the quantity of our relationships, Baym says. It’s connecting us to ever more people and broadening our circle of acquaintances.

This is assuring, I think. Future generations may wind up living in Cyborg City, but at least there’ll be all different kinds of cyborgs.

Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is rmartin@kucr.ku.edu.