Page 115 - Culture Technology Communication

100 Carleen F. Maitland and Johannes M. Bauer

where possible, addresses issues concerning compatibility of data
sources.

DEPENDENT VARIABLE

The growth of the Internet can be measured in a variety of ways
including changes in the amount of network traffic it generates, the
number of hits on web sites, estimates of the number of users, and
the number of computers it connects. Methods of measuring its
growth and impact are constantly being improved, with companies
racing to establish their measurement system as the most reliable
and accurate. The global nature of this study creates a unique re-
quirement for measuring Internet growth. The measure of growth
must be available for a wide range of countries including those in the
developing world. The most widely reported statistic on growth is
that of host counts. 10
Although Internet host counts do not give accurate statistics on
the number of users or their demographics, they do provide certain
advantages. Data on the number of Internet hosts have been col-
lected since the early eighties, and this consistency of measurement
is one the method’s main benefits (Rickard 1995). Counting the num-
ber of Internet hosts, which represent access to the Internet as op-
posed to usage or number of users, provides an estimate of the
minimum number of Internet users. To create estimates beyond a
minimum number a factor of users-per-host is required. This ratio is
approximately seven in the OECD countries and is expected to de-
cline, assuming extensive diffusion over several years, to one. By
comparing estimates of the number of users gathered through ran-
dom telephone survey studies with the minimum number of users
from host counts, estimates of Internet access have improved, al-
though no truly accurate measure exists (Lotter 1998).
Therefore, in the following analysis an “adoption” is considered
11
the addition of a host to the Internet. The data on the number of In-
ternet hosts both globally and on a country-by-country basis were ob-
tained from the Network Wizards web site (<http://www.nw.com/>),
the most frequently cited source of Internet diffusion data (Press
1997). Although the Internet had its start back in 1969 as ARPANET
and evolved into Bitnet in 1981 (Leiner et al. 1998), the data used in
this study begin in 1991 and are measured in six-month increments.
The reason for starting in 1991 is although data on the number of In-
ternet hosts prior to 1991 exist, it was not until 1991 that hosts were
attributed to a particular top level domain name representing their
country of origin. Attributing hosts to particular domain names