MySpace burst onto the scene with an unprecedented popularity, marking one of the first highly successful social networking sites. Its success was closely followed by that of Facebook, and most recently, Twitter — which has turned out to be one of Howard University students’ favorite means of keeping friends posted, often complete with joke cracking and trash talking.
Twitter, and other sites of its nature, have recently become tremendously popular with not only Howard students, but also celebrities, soccer moms and everyone else in between.
Interestingly enough, it seems that African Americans engage in social media networking more than their Caucasian or other minority counterparts.
According to a recent survey done by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonpartisan think-tank, African Americans are more likely to use Twitter, or any other status-updating networking site than members of any other ethnic group.
Is there a reason that black people are more interested in social networking sites— or at least, tend to use them more frequently than people of other ethnic groups?
According to the aforementioned study, which was released in October of 2009, 26 percent of African Americans use social networking sites, as opposed to only 18 percent of Hispanics and 19 percent of Caucasians.
The purposes of these sites are to keep people connected, and to promote and facilitate networking.
Surely Caucasians and Hispanics aren’t less interested in building relationships than blacks. So what’s the difference?
The majority of Twitter users (Howard students specifically), use this site and others of its kind to get things off their chests, to talk about issues that bother them.
Part of the appeal to these social networking sites is that the publisher knows that there’s someone out there in the cyber-world who’s going to read (and possibly comment on) the original thought they decided to express as a status.
Maybe as African Americans we have more things to get off our chests, and while we as average individuals might not have the time (or desire) to write a novel, or the celebrity to sit on Oprah’s couch to talk about what’s going on in our lives, we do have access to free social networking sites.
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