New life in the Net

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Feb 20, 2001

NEW YORK (NYT) -- Despite the grim outlook for many Internet companies, the business climate does not seem to be deterring new Internet users. A report released Sunday night by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that the number of American adults with Internet access grew by 16 million the last six months of 2000. That brings the total number of adults using the Internet in the United States to 104 million, or 56 percent of the adult population.

The Pew study also measured the number of the nation's children using the Internet, finding that 30 million, or 45 percent of those under 18, have online access. Almost three-quarters of those in middle school and high school (ages 12-17) have access, compared with almost a third of those under 12.

"We have developed a very rich picture of what we call a typical day online," said Lee Rainie, the project's director. "And every day, there are more people online, and they're doing more things."

During an average day at the end of 2000, the survey found, 58 million Americans were logging on, 9 million more than the average daily Internet population in the middle of last year. Women, minorities and people earning $30,000 to $50,000 were among the population segments of Internet users that grew the most from late spring, when the project did its first survey, to the end of 2000.

Even so, the survey found significant disparities in online access by income and age. Eighty-two percent of those living in households earning more than $75,000 have Internet access, compared with 38 percent of those in households earning less than $30,000. Seventy- five percent of those 18 to 29 have Internet access, compared with 15 percent of those 65 and over. The survey's margin of error is 3 percentagepoints. Pew based it survey on 1999 population estimates.

The measurements of the Pew study are comparable to a survey released last week by Nielsen/NetRatings, which found that 60 percent of the U.S. population has Internet access.

It doesn't look good for the XFL

NEW YORK (AP) -- The XFL is losing viewers at a staggering rate. The fledgling football league NBC-TV jointly owns with the World Wrestling Federation lost another quarter of its television audience on the network, according to preliminary Week 3 ratings, after a 50 percent drop the previous week. Most significant, viewership fell below what sponsors were promised when they bought ad time.

The bad news comes despite a tight game that wasn't decided until the final play, with the Los Angeles Xtreme beating the Las Vegas Outlaws 12-9 on a last-second field goal.

The preliminary overnight rating for Saturday night's XFL broadcast on NBC was 3.8, meaning an average of 3.8 percent of television homes in the country's largest 49 markets were tuned in at any given time. That represents a 25.5 percent decline from the Feb 10 overnight rating (5.1), and a 63 percent fall from the debut broadcast (10.3). Full national ratings are to be released later in the week.

The plummeting ratings mirror what happened to the USFL, another outdoor spring football league. The USFL -- which, unlike the XFL, lured some top talent from the NFL -- went from a 14.2 rating in its first game to 7.4 in its second in 1983. The rating dropped to 3.3 by Week 15. The USFL folded after three seasons.

Stirring debate on art and ethics

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (NYT) -- The legal issues may still be in play, and the technical outcome is anyone's guess. But in a forum on the Napster controversy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week, it was the ethical issues that took center stage.

"Why is Napster so interesting? Why is it so difficult?" These were the opening queries posed by Eric Scheirer, an analyst with Forrester Research, speaking to the small colloquium in Cambridge, Mass.

The audience was largely drawn from the MIT faculty and the university's Media Lab. Napster is a music-trading Web site that acts as an index to the music libraries on users' personal computers. In a lively give and take with the group, Scheirer said that Napster had raised arguments about art and ownership that had not traditionally been part of the public discourse.

"Napster is pushing on these questions as we try to articulate the role of art," said Scheirer, who holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab. He said one in four American adults had downloaded music by one means or another, making the Napster issue "a cultural phenomenon."

For Scheirer, Napster raises four big questions: What is the appropriate relationship between the artist and fan base? Is the capitalist model the right model for creating art? What is copyright for? And what is art for in a consumer society?

Citing the band Metallica, which filed one of the first suits against Napster, he said many of the group's fans had rallied against what he called Metallica Inc., the profit-oriented business side of the heavy metal group. He said disputes raised by digital technologies like Napster would force American society to clarify its definition of copyright. The traditional European notion, he said, considered art an inalienable part of the artist. In the United States, he said, the strict constitutional interpretation is that copyright exists to encourage continued creation.