BKSTTNET.RVW   980130

"The State of the Net", Peter Clemente, 1998, 0-07-011979-1, U$24.95
%A   Peter Clemente
%C   300 Water Street, Whitby, Ontario   L1N 9B6
%D   1998
%G   0-07-011979-1
%I   McGraw-Hill Ryerson/Osborne
%O   U$24.95 905-430-5000 fax: 905-430-5020 louisea@McGrawHill.ca
%P   179 p.
%T   "The State of the Net"

First of all, an awful lot of people who get excited by the title of
this book are going to be disappointed.  The state under consideration
is primarily a mercantile entity.  The emphasis is on demographics
with a business, and more particularly marketing, orientation.

Yet another shock awaits the eager entrepreneur who wants to use the
information for those very purposes.  The information is not based on
the many metrics that do exist in diverse places on the net, but
rather in a poll of a thousand "truly representative" Internet users. 
In fact, this isn't the state of the net, but the net of the States,
since the poll was based on a telephone query of random US phone
numbers.  Oh, and they had to (in descending order of numbers of
phones contacted) agree to participate, not immediately hang up, not
be a machine, not be working, and speak English.  To be included in
the study, respondents had to use any Internet application except
email.  (It would have been interesting to find out how many people
*only* used email, but this information is not given.)  (It is also
very interesting to note that the one calculation we are given from
hard data in Appendix B is flatly wrong: an estimate of the total
[American] population of the Internet seems to be based on an
assumption of one phone number per person, rather than per household.)

Chapter one is an introduction, briefly stating Clemente's presumption
that there are four types of Internet users.  Chapter two is a
business oriented history of the net, plus some projections for the
future.  Chapter three lists the demographic information, and we find
that (surprise, surprise) those who have computers at home and pay for
Internet connectivity in order to have access to information have
higher than average income, more than average education, and that as
more people are getting on to the net the net numbers are getting
closer to that of the general population.  (The only real revelation
that I found was that more netizens are married than is the case in
the general population, and fewer are divorced or separated.)  "What
Consumers Are Doing on the Net" is the title of chapter four. 
Although there is some information about activity and purchasing, most
of the content deals with issues of brands of software used and modem
speed.  Chapter five, on the "Internet household," is much the same,
looking at time online plus some geographical distinctives.  (Surprise
again: there relatively are more Internet households in California
than Mississippi.)  Chapter six has plenty of data on Internet
segments, or different groups, but only seems to have one point: a
rather bald assertion that "personal" users are the most significant. 
Chapter seven is a reasonable, though far from astonishing,
introduction to marketing activities on the Internet.  Appendices A
and B seem to be primarily about why the research that went into this
book is so good.

The conclusions Clemente draws are not necessarily wrong, but are
definitely overstated.  For example, there is the assertion that nine
out of ten Internauts are online for personal reasons.  He admits that
ninety percent personal use, sixty percent business use, forty percent
academic use (and an unreported amount of corporate use) means that
there has to be some overlap, but he allows his statement to stand.

If you are a newcomer to the net, and haven't been paying much
attention up until now, the data presented in this book will give you
a quick introduction to the net, and won't be entirely off the mark. 
What details there are will be of more use in deciding on a product or
type of business than it will be in guiding the marketing or
operations of a given venture.  The tables of statistics and sometimes
facile analysis give little indication of the cultural environment in
which any business must function.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998   BKSTTNET.RVW   980130