The Dynamics of Mass Interaction

Abstract

Usenet may be regarded as the world’s largest and fastest growing conversational application. In 1988 there were fewer than 500 newsgroups. Current estimates vary, but at the time of our data collection in December 1996, there were over 17,000 newsgroups, with approximately 3 million users worldwide (Harrison, 1994). This growth has been achieved without any centralized organization or governing body (King, 1997). The ubiquity of Usenet, and the fact that it supports conversations between hundreds or even thousands of participants, provides the opportunity to study what we term mass interaction. However, we currently lack basic data about Usenet interactions. The current paper analyses over 2.15 million messages produced by 659,450 people in 500 representative newsgroups collected over 6 months. We provide descriptive data about newsgroup demographics, communication strategies, and interactivity. We then derive predictions from the common ground model of communication to test predictions about how these parameters interact.