African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
My boyfriend has been getting really into twitter lately which means that I—whether I want to or not—have been getting into twitter too. I’ve been getting so into twitter that I actually spent 20 minutes of my life today listening to a “big, geeky white American guy” (the geek's words, not mine!) pontificate about twitter, and now am spending another 30 minutes blogging about it!
The big geeky white guy, aka Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman, recently delivered a 20-minute lecture called, “Listening to global voices" at a TED conference at Oxford.
If you listen to "global voices," according to Zuckerman, as they talk on sites like twitter, you’ll see that though they're chattering away, they’re not necessarily talking to each other--across cultural lines.
The gist of his talk, which could have done without the anti-American asides and lefty clichés, was that the Internet was supposed to “smooth out cultural difference, to put us all on a common field”—but it hasn’t.
One of his most interesting examples is about African Americans on twitter. Apparently, according to research done by twitter itself, 24% of American twitter users are African Americans, which is about twice as high as the number African Americans represent in the population.
What’s more interesting is that if you follow the most popular twitter conversations, which twitter lists on the right side of the webpage, you’ll see that the conversations are segregated: African Americans are talking to each other within their own community and white Americans are doing the same.
During a recent weekend, for instance, two of the trendiest topics were “cook out” and “oil spill.” The “cook out” conversation was almost exclusively African American, while white wonks and guilt-ridden New York Times-readin' liberals were all over the “oil spill” discussion.
Because I was skeptical of how segregated conversations on twitter actually are, I took a look for myself. Two of the hottest topics today are Contador and Schleck (Tour de France participants). Those, not surprisingly, are caucasian conversations in the main--as are "Washington" and "Palin" which are also top topics today. Two other hot topics are rapper “Rick Ross” and "oldpeoplenames," where heavily African American conversations are going on.
Looks like global voices are making local calls.
Henry David Thoreau's remark about the invention of the telegraph in his day strike me as relevant here: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
If twitter is the new telegrapher, can it be that black and white Americans believe they have little, if nothing, to communicate to each other across the "virtual" wire?
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
It's probably more the cultural difference between middle-class suburbs and the poor inner-city. If you don't own very much, and you typically have a $1.50 left over at the end of the month, to invest, it makes your time horizon a lot shorter, and your interests a lot different. For some people, it's "live for today because tomorrow may never come." That's the attitude.
May '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
How does one identify the race of Twitter users? I don't recall that question being asked when I started an account. You can't identify people by the way they talk, because we speak differently depending on the subject, the perceived audience and other circumstances. All people know multiple dialects and alternate between them. Poor people tend to be less agile with language, but even they adjust depending on whether they're talking politics or barbecues.
Anyway, it's certainly not surprising that people still generally prefer talking to similar people. Trust is even more unlikely between dissimilar people. Technology and global economics won't change basic human nature.
That said, I'm surprised if it's true that blacks on Twitter are not common in "oil spill" discussions, since the Gulf Coast is heavily black. I wonder if Twitter usage varies significantly by region. Perhaps Southerners are underrepresented on Twitter?
May '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
It could also have more to due with cultural priorities than cultural interests. In other words, a person might care about the oil spill but be less culturally inclined to spend a lot of time and words fretting about it.
May '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
Like Aaron I'm suspicious of the methodology. Assuming that they do they have good techniques in place to determine the race of a "tweet" author, the result shouldn't surprise us. Communications based on social nets are going to follow the lines of those nets. There are likely to be cultural concentrations in those nets (it would be big news if there weren't) and so average "conversations" will pick up the racial/cultural mix of the social net that initiates it. Exceptional topics like big global news stories will break across those, but those are exceptions.
There are a couple of lessons here:
1. Services like Twitter were developed to meet a demand, the desire to communicate with one's friends. That's how it's advertised. Communicating with others happens in time and in the right context, but not until that time and context.
2. If we want to develop a serious "bridge" between the races, Twitter probably isn't the right platform.
May '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
Who cares? By that I mean, aren't we just engaging in the same race baiting that Liberals love so much?? Why don't you tweet what you want, everyone else can tweet what they want, and we can let the liberals figure out what the heck it has to do with race, class, gender and sexuality.
May '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
Ryan, it's different in this context because we're really talking about culture, rather than race. It's an interesting consideration: whether like-minded people can be drawn together by subjects of conversation alone.
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
G.A. Dean, you write:
I think you're right--services like twitter and facebook were developed to communicate among friends. The point that Zuckerman was making in this lecture, though, was that internet optimists--like Nicholas Negroponte in his book Going Digital--thought that the internet could connect wide and varied groups of people in new ways. It doesn't seem to be doing that, at least not according to the extent that Zuckerman envisions.
Jun '10
Re: African Americans: Digging Twitter More than White Americans
It seems that to the self-possessed geek there is always a bright and shiny solution to any quixotic “problem.” Here, to the bespectacled typist, all of their social dragons are reduced to mere mechanical windmills composed of flying widgets, squeaky wheels and an overall, and regrettable, lack of innovation. As one of their kind once observed: the clunky medium is the message.
Of course it is - thinking & talking-it-out and rarely putting your back in it, getting your knees dirty, and work-it. These things are not, as they say, "shovel-ready." Perhaps such a twitchy professor, having nothing much interesting to say about barbeques on Twitter, should instead attend a hot charcoal barbeque, even if only to take notes while contemplating the underwater mishaps of great corporations, post-modern pirates and frothy sea monsters.
On the other hand there is real poetry in naming this tool of the talkers “Twitter.” Such a precociously self-deprecating sense of humor is almost worth the price of admission…though I’d still get a bigger kick out of seeing the whole lot of them play an eighty minute game of Rugby than sit-and-twitter at the coffee shop.