[Air-l] my second post

[Jonathan Marshall]

my computer froze in the middle of this so apologies if you end 
up with two copies.


These are all interesting figures but it would help to find out 
the usual distributiton of words in the English Language.

I suspect that 'help' is a much commoner word than cyberspace.
Certainly in my daily life I'd use it a lot more frequently.
So the search results may have nothing to do with web pages 
looking for help or offering help - although i'd expect there 
would be a fair number of these as co-operation is important 
to humans - something often forgotten in our political world.  

Most requests for help would, I suspect, be invisible to google -
being in non searchable lists or newsgroups etc.

We would expect that analysts might use different terms 
to the ones people employ in daily life - think of physics
for example.  So the difference in frequency is not unsuprising
and might even be healthy.

Also somethings tend to be much more problematic and have an
analytic tradition behind them which makes them more visible
and easier to deal with.

That said I'd say that studies of online co-operation needed to be done 
as do studies on the role of Religion online.  I'd expect that when 
Religion arises it would be as 'disruptive' as gender, politics and race.

'Online Business' would seem to have so much written about it from
a supposedly practical point of view - many bookshops seem to carry 
little else in their 'cyberculture' sections - that I find it surprising
there is little analysing it.  Perhaps the problem is that the 
audience for that only really want to hear one kind of thing.  As well
it is really hard to get businesses to give open and honest information
about the way things actually work - as it sends messages to their
competitors.

Anyway:

I'm going to try and write a paper soon about the ways that people
collaborate on a mailing list, primarily  focusing on a group effort 
to write a novel, but also looking at more incidental things.  

By the by the novel, in case people are interested in 
cyberpunk-fantasy-new-age-airport-trash meets the Cthulhu mythos 
and Internet theory, is at:

http://www.geocities.com/jpmarshall.geo/cybermind/novel/novel.html

Some people hate it, some really like it :)

jon

Eero Tarik <et at tarik.com.au> wrote:

> a Google search reveals that the term "cyberspace" appears 
> 2.4million 
> times in the online world.
> Identity appears 14 million times, gender 15 million times, 
> politics 26 
> million and race 32 million.
> 
> God appears 64 million times and love gets 119 million mentions - 
> far 
> more important to "cyberspacers" than food, which is only 
> mentioned 86 
> million times.
> 
> Interestingly, the internet produces 244 million results, but lags 
> behind good old "sex" with 269 million and business with 266 million..
> 
> And at the top of my little list is the search term, "help" which 
> comes 
> in with 301 million results.
> 
> When I look at the kind of subject matter that appears to be the 
> focus 
> of internet researchers I am dismayed that so much of the 
> intellectual 
> effort seems to be directed at the small end of town. There 
> appears to 
> be an over emphasis upon cyberspace and cyberism, along with 
> identity, 
> gender, race and politics.
> 
> A search of the titles of the papers presented to last years 
> conference 
> shows that 11 contained the term cyberspace, 32 contained the term 
> identity, 12 contained gender, and 2 contained race -  none 
> contained 
> the term "help".
> 
> The online world, it seems, is screaming out for help - 301million 
> times, yet academia appears to want  to talk about minority issues.
> 
> The online world wants help, sex and business - academia gives it 
> cyberspace and discussion of race, gender and politics.
> 
> Am I missing something???
> 
> Dont you just love numbers :-)
> 
> see ya
> Eero Tarik
> Adelaide, South Australia
> 
> 



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