How are our children relating to one other, and do the new connections facilitated by modern technology offer possibilities for healthy interactions? This was, for me, the key issue discussed at yesterday's conference In the Wild: wellbeing, the web and the future of education, organised by Channel 4's education wing. The day-long event made a valiant attempt to pull together disparate and often competing strands: the crisis in British children's experience of growing up, as starkly revealed earlier this year by a Unicef report on childhood in the developed world, the positive and negative impact that the web may have on this, and how models of learning stimulated by new technology could impact on traditional concepts of education.

One of the speakers, Bronwyn Kunhardt, has already laid out on this site the difficulties that many adults encounter in engaging with the possibilities that new media offer our young people. In the same way that the concept of childhood itself has become a crucible in which we grind our adult anxieties, so we shoehorn older fears about paedophiles or plagiarism into discussions about the web.

But, as Dr. James Bradburne pointed out, new technology is everything that was invented after you were born. The anxiety applied as much to television as it does now to Second Life.

Perhaps the most interesting area of debate centred around social networking. Fifty per cent of on-line teenagers now have a profile available, compared with only 20% of adults. As Bebo's Rachel O'Connell said, we are witnessing an extraordinary paradigm shift where people of a very young age are able to communicate, publish, critique and collaborate as never before. The possibilities are thrilling - at a time when it is de rigueur to bemoan the breakdown of community, and the detrimental effect that this is having on our children, those very people are creating their own intensive and highly supportive networks via a different medium. But they are also frightening - because of the challenge they present to our usual notions of how relationships are formed, or of learning, and because the adult terror of the lurking predator at the school gates has now transferred to the chatroom. It's also worth remembering that one of Unicef's most damning findings related to how "kind and helpful" children found their peers.

But it is the first of these anxieties that throws up a particularly interesting question. Are relationships necessarily less profound when they are founded online rather than face-to-face? I was struck by the contradictions coming from the Mediasnackers presentation, two well beyond-Web 2.0 young men who were clearly more engaged with the reality of young people's web experience than anyone else in the room. One argued that he had created strong relationships online, and that it was simply the case that those who didn't engage with social networking would never believe in its possibilities. The other said that, whenever he was teaching young people about the possibilities of technology, he would always emphasise that face-to-face contact could never be trounced.

Perhaps it's too easy to nay-say social networking, and the significance of having 100 friends on Bebo. At a time when children are more captive than ever before - whether it be because of adults' deep risk aversion, extended schools, lack of outdoor space - maybe we ought to be celebrating the way that they have ducked under the wire and created a whole new version of intimacy.

Surely the more relevant question is what ethic they bring to these interactions. If social networking encourages a sense of disposability of relationships, a lack of authenticity, a demand for instant recognition, then there is much to worry about. But if it offers the opportunity for connections not based on geographical ease or social fit, and if it develops the kind of socialisation skills that are bound to be necessary for this generation, then shouldn't we be glad? What this day made clear was how the nature of communication had already changed beyond all recognition, in the space of 16 years. This acceleration can only continue. The answer is to take what we value from the old ethic of relationships and adapt it to the new one, rather than sitting crossly on the sidelines.