According to official UseNet statistics, by early-mid 1990s MAP
grew to a peak readership of about 60,000 readers (again some of
whom were forwarding to entire mailing lists, or --as testified by
personal emails sent to Harel and found in "Sidebar" to his piece
"Electronic Activism: Part I" -- readers printing out and sharing
with offline friends, neighbors and fellow active citizens, none
counted in official statistics).
At the time the 'population' of the internet was less than 10% of
today's (in fact it was circa 2011 when the internet's population
was close to exactly 10 times larger than in the early to mid
1990s). On a "per capita" basis, this was the equivalent of more than
600k subscribers This is not to toot our horn, but of historical
relevance. Update: by mid/late 2010's internet was 30x the size is
was in 1994 so our 60k subscribvers per-capita equivalent to 18
million subscribers.
No wonder a Senior Fellow at Worldwatch Institute
contacted me out of the blue saying he read and enjoyed my
"Electronic Activism" article, heard I wrote a part II and could I
send it to him?
Lately I've been too disorganized and scatterbrained to put
together any real sort of Bio, jumping from one tiny project (like
finding excellent winter hats normally over $20 each for a dollar
each when a company went out of business and getting more than a
dozen to give to the local homeless shelter) to another...not
focusing well on large-scale activism as I used to. And dealing with
personal life stuff, like most of us.
At hard as it is to imagine, at one point Harel was contacted by
an activist who wasn't famous - just that, that activist
contact me (Harel) telling me that they had heard about me and my
work from someone well known. Surreal as it may sound today,
they heard about me from Canadian filmmaker Mark Achbar (known best
for his movie The Corporation, but at the time known for Directing
"Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", and known then
and even more so since for his
many awards). In a spring 1995 email: "I was referred to you
by Mark Achbar" and "I'm a journalism student..doing an article on
internet activism and i hear you're the 'king.' Seeing how the
internet has caught on...what gave you the idea to start
misc.activism.progressive [4 years earlier and projects that led to
it, a year before that]?" (see here
or see the full sized scan)
Amazing the things you find in old dusty carboard boxes of old
activism you've built up over the years! In fact I was not 'king' or
even 'prince' but together with lots of help from other activists
whose roles were critical (Rich Winkel and Dave Ratcliffe, Jym Dyer, Yigal Arens, Sabina Astete and others)
(Even at a mere 10 articles read per day over (say) only 260 days
or only 71% out of 365 days actually reading (in fact, in the 1990s
fairly "addition-grade" daily reading was the norm) done over 15
years (e.g. 1991-2006, while
MAP continued until about 2011) over lower level readership of say,
only 25,000 readers, would give about a billion "views" using these
mostly low-ball very conservative estimates)
