In an effort to participate in ethnographic research for this project, I participated in an online discussion forum on Essence.com. Essence is a magazine that focuses on the African American community, predominately African American women. The discussion was started by a user named “Red Butterly” on June 22, 2009 but the discussion has continued through present day. There were over 6 pages of responses. The topic was “If a great man came along would we know it or will we just dump in the heap with the rest???” I posed a user named Jessica and responded to a woman named Teri’s comment. Some profile pictures are visible while others are icons, making it unknown whether the users are African American or not. However, in taking the forum (Essence) into consideration, it is fair to estimate that most if not all users are African American. No one has posted in response to my reply to date. Many of the comments are insightful, and try to help and support other women posting on the site. I tried to write my post in concurrence with the previous ones, while also adding my own insight. I was surprised to find how many women replied to one anothers post. I think it definitely says something about the African American online community. In keeping with my findings about African American users on Twitter, they actively communicate with one another online. In fact, they communicate more than other groups of Internet users.
I looked at the user Red Butterfly’s other posts. She has started tens of discussions on this site. Some discussions have 8 replies, some have 30, and some have 500 replies! The copious amount of replies and posts in the discussion forums amazed me!
You can find the forum as well as my post at:
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