Twitter-verse draws more black followers into its orbit

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First lady Michelle Obama officially entered the Twitter-verse last Saturday, at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The popular social messaging service deepened its reach into the public when she sent her message, brief enough and consistent with the “what are you doing now?” Twitter ethos: “from flotus: here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay,” she wrote, in a reference to President Obama and Jay Leno.

Michelle Obama’s first, benign message underscores the inroads that Twitter has made in black life and culture. A new report on who’s using Twitter bears that out with startling results.

The comprehensive report on Twitter usage released April 29 by Edison Research and Arbitron reveals, among other things, that the service “does appear to be disproportionately popular with African-Americans.” The study finds that 24 percent of the 17 million Americans “tweeting” at any given time are African-American, “which is approximately double the percentage of African-Americans in the current U.S. population.”

“Indeed, many of the ‘trending topics’ on Twitter on a typical day are reflective of African-American culture, memes and topics,” says the report, which elaborates on Twitter’s impact on the nation as a whole.

The Twitter report represents responses to a survey of 1,753 Americans age 12 and over, and was conducted through landline and mobile phone interviews done in February. It’s the culmination of three years of research into Twitter usage trends.

The study finds that, overall, all Americans’ awareness of Twitter has “exploded” from 5 percent in 2008 to 87 percent in 2010, a fact that’s created an unlikely situation: “With the percentage of Americans who have access to the Internet stalled at roughly 85 percent, more people are aware of Twitter than could possibly use the service,” the report states, blaming that anomaly on the way Twitter has saturated the culture, fueling our everyday conversations at water coolers and in break rooms everywhere.

The Twitter report’s data on black users is startling enough on its own; what gives its findings deeper significance is how they conform with those of the Pew Internet report on wireless Internet use, released in July 2009. Together, the surveys past and present reveal dovetailing results that strongly suggest the storied “digital divide” between black and white America, once taken as a kind of socioeconomic truism, is no longer true at all.

The Pew report says that, among users of the Internet on mobile platforms — thought to be the next frontier in Internet access — “African Americans are the most active users of the mobile Internet — and their use of it is also growing the fastest.”

The Pew report found that 48 percent of Africans Americans have at one time used mobile Internet access for information, e-mail or instant messaging, twice the national average of 32 percent. Some 29 percent of African Americans use the Internet on their handheld on an average day, way above the national average of 19 percent.

And Pew found that between 2007 and 2009, mobile Internet access among African Americans soared by 141 percent.

The reasons vary as to why the black American presence on Twitter, and the online experience in general, have gotten so strong. One reason is availability. As communications technology has evolved, devices have gotten smaller, less expensive; and more affordable for households with smaller incomes.

Major companies such as software giant Microsoft have invested heavily in technology centers tasked with enhancing computer literacy, making it easier for black Americans (younger ones in particular) to acquire experience with computers and the Web.

And with advances in wi-fi technology and proliferation of Web-enabled kiosks at airports and so-called Internet cafes, the Web is just more accessible, more in your face, than ever before.

With Twitter, the celebrity factor can’t be overlooked. Like countless others in America, black people take many of their cultural cues from celebrities and athletes. A wide range of black figures in sports and popular culture, including Questlove of the Roots, Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes, Tyrese Gibson, Tyra Banks and 50 Cent have embraced the Twitter phenomenon, an extension of both the African American “grapevine” and our national passion for good celebrity dish.

“It’s penetrated different pockets of African-American culture,” said Tom Webster, author of the Twitter report. “I wouldn’t say it’s a global phenomenon, but NBA stars tweeting is a real bubble of usage. [Shaquille O’ Neal’s Twitter address] the_real_shaq has almost three million followers. You have a lot of major African-American celebrities accumulating massive amounts of followers – white, black, Hispanic, they’re from everywhere.”

And the embrace of Twitter speaks to an age-old survival strategy for African-Americans: In ways more surprising to Internet analysts than to black Americans, Twitter taps into our historical experience of making more out of less: in this case, getting a black perspective across to the world — and doing it 140 characters at a time.