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@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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