Exploration of World Wide Web Tilts From Eclectic to Mundane

By AMY HARMON http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/technology/26ONLI.html?ex=999837639&ei=1&en=fe2b32805f7cece2

Bob Dudley remembers a time not long ago when his favorite activity on a sunny weekend afternoon was surfing the World Wide Web. Drifting from one hyperlink to another, he read online diaries, became a fishing rights expert, played search engines against each other to see which came up with the best results.

It was, he says, "like going to a bookstore and browsing through all the stacks — oh, look at this, oh, look at that! I couldn't pull myself away."

This summer, Mr. Dudley, a 53- year-old advertising consultant, has been spending weekends outside. The Web still comes in handy for checking stock quotes and news, and he used it recently to look up prices on kayaks.

But in a shift mirrored by many other Internet users, Mr. Dudley's interest in the Web is no longer driven by eclectic imagination. When he logs on now, he knows what he wants and he mostly knows where to get it.

The new utilitarian view of the Web marks a disappointment for cultural critics who had seen the medium as fundamentally more democratic than traditional media outlets like radio, television and newspapers, because the barriers to entry were so low. The Web was supposed to subvert corporate domination of culture by giving a global soapbox — or printing press, or television station — to anyone with a computer and a modem.

While plenty of people do publish their personal musings and pictures of their babies, new data shows that for many people, the Web has become a routine electronic device. Often, Internet users stick to a half- dozen sites for news, sports scores, airline tickets and other things they need regularly. Many set up "personalized portals" that display only the categories of news, entertainment and financial information they are interested in when they log on.

Last year, about 60 percent of Internet users visited more than 20 Web sites in a typical month, according to Jupiter Media Metrix (news/quote), a research firm that measures traffic online; this year the proportion is close to half. The number of people using search engines as a starting point has also decreased significantly, a reflection of the more direct, predetermined approach to the Web.

People are spending more time online, according to Jupiter; the average user in the United States spent 20.7 hours in July, up 2 hours from last year. But their visits are concentrated in fewer places.

"We always think of the Internet as being very diverse, democratic — that everyone goes to hundreds of sites every week," said Mark Mooradian, a senior analyst at Jupiter. "In truth, that's less and less the case."

Only 15 of the thousands of sites that provide health information attract enough traffic for Jupiter to rank them, and last month 43 percent of the visitors to those went to the top three. Visitors to news sites concentrated their attention even more heavily, with 72 percent going to MSNBC, CNN and The New York Times (news/quote) on the Web in July. Among map site users, 82 percent visited Mapquest.com last month, compared with the 3.3 percent who went to Randmcnally.com, the fifth-most visited map site on the Web.

In a separate survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project earlier this year, 29 percent said they were spending more time online, and 17 percent less. The reason most often cited by people who said they were spending more time was that they needed to for school or work. About half of those who said they were spending less time online said simply that it was no longer necessary.

That America's infatuation with the Web as a destination for cybersurfing adventures has morphed into a more mundane fondness for an information tool is in many ways testament to how quickly it has become a part of everyday life for so many.

"I guess I feel I've found most of the things of interest to me," Peter Merholtz, 28, of San Francisco, wrote in an e-mail message. "Surfing jaunts tend to feel like bicycling around the block. I'm also much more pointed in my Web use — I typically get some durn-fool notion in my head (like pursuing semiotic and cognitive issues in cartography), fire some queries into Google, and click until either the subject seems exhausted or I am."

What is lost, some say, is the experience of serendipity and the delight in finding things that you would not naturally seek out.

"What I worry about when it comes to the Web is that people are encouraged to drill down into their areas of concern to such a degree that they get closeted in their own reflections of themselves," said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "That can militate against an open society. And surfing was a way out of that."

Indeed, the Web has more than lived up to its promise as an easily searchable database of human knowledge for researchers, academics and anyone who wants to answer a health question or get directions or find out how long jasmine tea should steep before it gets bitter.

But its impact on popular culture is harder to discern. Many of the online magazines that had grander ambitions than recording the random thoughts of an individual author have disappeared in recent months. So have several independent entertainment sites that showcased animations and movies that had no other outlet.

And while much has been made of the threat file-sharing sites like Napster pose to the mainstream music industry, most of the music being traded online is Top 40 hits.

That may be partly because major media corporations have met the threat of the Web by using marketing budgets and advertising in television, print and radio outlets that they already own to drive consumers to their own sites. And as numerous Internet start-ups have flopped or come close, the big media companies have scooped them up, even as they merge with one another.

The arrival of residential high- speed Internet connections, often cited as the next wave for the Web, is likely to further the advantage of major media sites over homespun Web broadcasters, because the cable and phone companies that provide the connections allot far greater bandwidth for downloading material than for consumers to put their own contributions online.

Of course, it may simply be human nature to flock to what everybody else is looking at. Features like Yahoo (news/quote)'s "Buzz Index," which lists the most-searched news stories and photos of the day, build on themselves in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of popularity.

"The Web is a democracy of opportunity, but not necessarily of outcome," said Bernardo Huberman, a fellow at Hewlett-Packard (news/quote)'s research laboratory and author of "Laws of the Web," to be published this fall by the M.I.T. Press.

"At the beginning it was like a beautiful, fertile ground where all sorts of organizations could theoretically survive," he said. "But the selection process has been incredibly fast."

Even in a study he did of sex sites, which tend to have similar material, Mr. Huberman said he found very few sites attracting most of the visits.

Perhaps it is not surprising that most people's explorations of the Web would be limited, just as there are only a handful of best-selling books, and "West Wing" and "Survivor" garner greater audiences than other shows. But because the Web offers the potential for many millions of voices, critics say the consolidation of attention may say more about the public's interest in cultural diversity than it does about the medium itself.

"A medium can't do any more than its users want or think to do with it," said Mark Crispin Miller, director of the project on media ownership at New York University. "The emergence of every new major medium over the last century or so has invariably been accompanied by a lot of utopian expectations. All our major media have come at us as if from God himself to redeem us from the restrictions of time and space."

Still, the Web has come closest to actually doing that. And many of those who make an effort to take advantage of what it has to offer say that the cultural impact of the Web lies not in its would-be alternative media outlets, but in the way it facilitates communication between individuals who would otherwise never have the benefit of each other's experience.

Steven Johnson, co-founder of Feed, an online magazine that suspended publication in June, said that when his wife, who is pregnant, was recently put on bed rest, he had searched the Web for information about her condition. In addition to WebMD (news/quote), the Internet's most-visited health site, and others put up by doctors, he found 20 or 30 sites with accounts of ordinary individuals who had been through the same experience.

"What it hasn't done so far is create great flowering of publications or media channels, and of course I have an interest in that," Mr. Johnson said. "But maybe it turns out that what the Web is good for is connecting people."

But that may be better done by e- mail, instant messaging and other parts of the Internet not related to the Web. That is what teenagers, the next generation of Internet users, appear to be far more interested in, according to researchers.

Griffith Dudley, Mr. Dudley's 12- year-old son, for instance, says he and his friends have designed joke Web sites and use the Web for school reports. But other than instant mes saging, they do not spend a lot of time online.

"We know how to use the Web," the younger Mr. Dudley said. "We can use the Web. We usually just don't."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/technology/26ONLI.html?ex=999837639&ei=1&en=fe2b32805f7cece2