Around the globe from Tunisia to Egypt and even in Iran, we have seen the significance and utility that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook can have on a society. It shows us that, in the age of cell phones, these tools can have a major impact on the promotion of change, that the information age is here to stay, and that many African Americans have jumped on board and are increasing in numbers annually.
However the question remains, “Do African Americans make use of these tools and take advantage of the information on the Internet or let them go to waste?”
A new report shows that African Americans continue to outpace whites in their use of data applications and internet use per capita, especially on cell phones and hand-held devices. As of 2009, nearly two-thirds of African Americans (64 percent) were wireless Internet users and were significantly more likely to own a cell phone than whites, making use much more of their phones’ data functions compared to white cell phone owners.
The same report said that 44 percent of black teens use their phones mostly to text and go on the Internet. Thus, black Internet users, regardless of the device they use, tend to be young, mobile, female and very heavy users of social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. For them, it is more about communicating with others than accessing information.
It has been confirmed that a large segment of Twitter’s population is African American. Data collected by Edison Research in their Annual Report on Twitter shows that black people are strongly represented on the portal. Although black people comprise about 12 percent of the general population, they account for 25 percent of the population of users on Twitter.
As a consequence, they tend to follow celebrities and post more trending topics. On Twitter, for example, young blacks follow more people, retweet more often, and reply to posts more frequently causing certain topics to rise in popularity that have nothing to do with breaking news or information. These usually are due to mundane and confusing subjects presented via hash tags (#). It is rare that you see tweets for African Americans on Twitter post with the hash tag “#politics,” “#Egypt,” or “#News,” but you will see “#ifsantawasblack” or “#ghettobabynames.” In fact, some have called these “black tags” as opposed to hash tags.
This may suggest that Twitter and Facebook may be seen as a form of instant messaging for all to see as opposed to a tool for finding out information. Moreover, recent trends on media usage note that blacks spend about the same time on the Internet daily (4 hours and 22 minutes) as they do watching television (4 hours and 43 minutes).
Social media has many advantages. However, it seems that they and the Internet, although designed for the sharing of data and information, are used more as a form of entertainment for African Americans than as a resource. –torrance stephens
