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CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 88 a lower spread value. As can be seen from Table 6.3, the median spread of the very frequent author is 363 days, essentially the entire year. It is only slightly less for the frequent authors, and drops considerably for the occasional and infrequent authors. However, even among the infrequent authors, the median spread is still greater than 120 days, or about 4 months time. This indicates a considerable breadth of participation, as measured by time, among all of the most frequently contributing authors. Third, the number of different days on which authors contributed messages can be analyzed. With this measure, ten days spread over six months is not differentiated from ten days spread over two weeks. Thus, the number of days is an indicator of intensity of commitment. Days, by definition, is equal to or less than spread and messages (an author could not have contributed 10 messages on 11 different days). When examining days, much more dramatic differences between the very frequent authors and the other types of authors emerge. The median number of days on which very frequent authors wrote messages was more than three times greater than the median number of days for the frequent authors. The medians of the occasional and infrequent authors decline by about half as we move down the scale. This measure indicates that intensity of participation is strongly correlated with frequency of participation. This finding is further supported by examining the ratio of messages to days across different author groups. A larger ratio of messages to days indicates a more intensive commitment to the group than a smaller ratio. As shown in Table 6.4 on the page before, very frequent authors wrote an average of 7.64 messages on every day they participated. At the same time, we should note that down to the infrequent authors, participants averaged about two posts for each day of participating. The distribution of messages by threads offers a second mode of assessing the behaviors of the participants. As discussed above, the nearly 46,000 messages posted to the group found their way into nearly 8,500 different threads. As discussed in Section 3.3 on page 51, every message contains a subject heading, which permits organization of the newsgroup by thread. Authors who are following up or replying to another message frequently will post a message in the same thread. This is to ease the reading of the newsgroup, as most newsreading software allows the user to select for reading only those articles matching indicating threads. In other words, threads serve as cues to other readers that a message is “related” to previous messages in the same thread. A thread can be viewed as miniature conversation among the participating authors, and the newsgroup can be considered to have as many simultaneous conversations as there are simultaneous threads.
CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 89 Table 6.5: Categorization of Threads by Number of Messages Thread Group Cumulative Percent of Number of Threads in Cumulative Number of Percent of Total Cumulative Percent of Minimum Number of Posts Decile Threads Threads Threads Posts Per Thread 1 10% 7 7 0.08% 0.08% 329 2 20% 21 28 0.25% 0.33% 162 3 30% 44 72 0.52% 0.85% 72 4 40% 89 161 1.05% 1.90% 41 5 50% 164 325 1.89% 3.79% 22 6 61% 321 646 3.83% 7.62% 12 7 71% 541 1187 6.38% 14.00% 7 8 81% 948 2135 11.18% 25.18% 4 9 90% 1855 3990 21.88% 47.06% 2 10 100% 4489 8479 52.94% 100.00% 1 A simple categorization of threads was created by sorting all messages posted to the newsgroup by the number of messages in the thread to which it was posted, and then grouping together threads by deciles of total posts. Thus, the first group of threads encompasses those threads associated with the ten percent of the messages posted to threads with the most posts. The tenth group of threads encompasses those threads associated with the ten percent of the messages posted to threads with the least posts. Table 6.5 and Table 6.6 on the next page provides descriptive statistics of the ten thread groups. This analysis is supplemented by Figures C.5, C.6, C.7 and C.8 in Appendix C on page 167. The top group, accounting for ten percent of the messages posted to the group, includes just seven threads, with a range of messages from 329 to 1,724. The bottom group – which by definition also includes ten percent of the messages – includes more than half the total threads, all of which have just a single message included. From this analysis, it is clear that most posts are concentrated in relatively few threads. Half of the messages posted to the group were associated with 325 threads. More than half of the threads contributed to in the talk.abortion newsgroup during the study period contained a single message. If threads are viewed as a series of messages forming an ongoing discussion, these threads represent conversational dead-ends. The single-message threads constituted about ten percent of the total messages posted to the newsgroup during the study period. Of course, all of these
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CHAPTER 1. COMPUTERS, CONVERSATION
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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 15 2.1
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APPENDIX B. DENSITY SCORES 165 Tabl
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Appendix C Supplemental Analysis 16
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APPENDIX C. SUPPLEMENTAL ANALYSIS 1
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 177 Best, Michael L. 1
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 Fisher, Bonnie, Mi
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 Hiltz, Starr Roxan
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 183 Mansbridge, Jane.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 Pateman, Carole. 1
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