Abstract
This is a study of Usenet, a collection of social cyberspaces in which people gather, interact, and exchange digital objects. Digital objects include a range of media and data structures not limited to lines or pages of text, complex formatted documents, sound, still images and videos, 3D geometry, programs, and databases. Hundreds of millions of people are already engaged in interactions in social cyberspaces, and the number is likely to grow into the billions as networked computers become as widespread as radios or light bulbs. Over the next few years, the Internet will become a popular medium of a scale that dwarfs and subsumes earlier communication media including telephone, radio, and television. In the process, the net is creating new forms of social space, new kinds of publics, in which there are rare but remarkable examples of collective action.
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Smith, M.A. (2003). Measures and Maps of Usenet. In: Lueg, C., Fisher, D. (eds) From Usenet to CoWebs. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0057-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0057-7_3
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