I will be presenting my practicum project tomorrow regarding African Americans online. Up until this point, most of the information I have gathered regarding African Americans online has led me in one direction- ACCESS! The digital divide is the gap between people with access to information technology and people who have limited or no access.
Here is a link of a short video about the Digital Divide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCIB_vXUptY
Whether I am researching and observing marketing, dating sites, games, etc. it all culminates by determining that the lack of options/sites/variance online is due to the lack of access African Americans have to computers and the Internet compared to other groups of people. Thus, I am posing several questions:
1. Do you think that black people and non-blacks are segregated online? On Twitter? On Facebook? Is real-life segregation being paralleled online?
2. What can be done to decrease the Digital Divide?
3. If you had to make an educated guess, what type of sites do you think are most popular among African American’s?
The thing about the internet is that it is completely up to the individual user as to how they use it. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter allow people to connect, but who you connect with is really up to you. You can friend strangers on Facebook and MySpace or try and follow them on Twitter, but to say that those site segregate people seems a little unfair. Real-life segregation is likely being paralleled online because in real-life people are segregated by their friends and interests, just like what's happening online. There may be a breakdown online because people feel more comfortable exploring certain interests in the privacy of their home through the internet, but I don't think you can claim that any racial divides on Twitter and Facebook are intentional segregation, it's just people interacting with their friends or looking at sites that interest them.
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