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Recently in Salon Technology

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 47: The contractor's contractor -- migrant labor on steroids
By Thomas Scoville
[08/25/99]

Books
Stalking Gates
In "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," Gary Rivlin provides a much-needed outsider's view of the Baron of Redmond -- and the rogues of Silicon Valley.
By Janelle Brown
[08/25/99]

Palestinian refugees get wired
What can the Internet bring to a culture that has been scattered across the world?
By Flore de Preneuf
[08/24/99]

We have computers. Why aren't we more productive?
Technology doesn't usually save companies time or money -- but in a competitive world, it often keeps them in business.
By Cate T. Corcoran
[08/23/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 46: Green tea and red ink -- Barry loses millions over breakfast
By Thomas Scoville
[08/21/99]

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Readers with long memories (by Internet standards) will remember the infamous Marty Rimm "study" of pornography on the Net, which made the cover of Time magazine, despite vast problems with its methodology and conclusions that online critics painstakingly detailed. More recently there was the Carnegie Mellon "study" purporting to link Internet use with depression -- another investigation in which the results were far less definitive than the press coverage warranted. Just this week we've been barraged with coverage of the latest in a series of "studies" of "Internet addiction," which tallies up a whopping 11.5 million Net addicts out there -- by adopting a comically loose definition of just what constitutes a Net junkie.

Everyone is starved for research about the Internet, of course -- that's what keeps dozens of consulting firms in business, and allows them to charge thousands of dollars for often-dubious reports cobbled together out of surveys and guesswork. But the pressure to put numbers on Net behavior continues to lead to questionable conclusions.

Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology + Biography + Archives

The latest and subtlest example arrived in Monday's Los Angeles Times, in a study that claimed that the World Wide Web is "contracting." Well, OK, Charles Piller's article doesn't call itself a "study"; rather, it's based on "research conducted for the Times by Web tracking companies." The conclusion, trumpeted in the headline "Web Travelers Follow Beaten Paths to Similar Sites," is that the Web universe grows narrower by the day: More and more of people's time on the Web, it seems, is spent at a small handful of leading sites. It sounds like a dire situation for those of us who have cherished the Web's openness -- or, in the article's words, its reputation as "the ultimate exponent of diversity and choice." And, in fact, unlike so many previous "studies," the L.A. Times piece doesn't suffer from any blatant methodological flaws or obvious factual gaffes.

But it's still off base. Here's why.

Next page | If top sites still only account for a third of Web use, what are we doing the rest of the time?