Taking a mathematical look at activity in my chosen electronic publications, the threads of discussion that caught my interest all began in the middle of February. The Library-specific threads seem to have died out in about four days each, with Americans at academic institutions contributing the entire discussion. Most messages in the Library lists were of the ``reply directly to me via email, and I'll summarize to the whole list'' nature, meaning that sometimes even the most interesting topics peaked at two messages: an announcement and a summary. The participants in the Library lists all appeared to be information professionals or pre-librarians of some sort.
The alt.culture.usenet newsgroup draws participants from academic, commercial, and
local dial-in BBS users from around the world. The discussion of the fate of the Internet
is still going strong on several Usenet newsgroups at once, and has spawned several
`child' threads that are weaving themselves throughout the Usenet, fidonet, and uucp-nets.
The cyber-metric breakdown looks like this:
| SUMMARY | SOURCE | TOPIC | DATES | MSGS | ON TOPIC | PEOPLE | ORIGIN |
| Should Computer Resources for students be funded by Lab fees and by Increased Tuition? | cwis-l | Student Computing Fee? | group: 1/18-2/28, thread: 2/18-2/22 | 5 | 9.25% | 4 | New York (3), Texas, Minnesota |
| What are your ideas for libraries of the future? | pacs-l | Libraries of the Future? | group: 1/19-2/28, thread: 2/18- 2/23 | 4 | 3.81% | 4 | California, Texas (2), Indiana |
| Is the Internet being killed by NREN, Kids, Commercialism, & New Users | alt.culture.usenet | Death of Net? | group: 1/17-2-28, thread: 2/13-2/28 | 75 | 29.53% | 42 | worldwide(see appendix) |