Getting to “The Root” of the Digital Divide

Those who know me well are VERY aware of my somewhat shameless enthusiasm about blog culture.  So, when my favorite blog The Root (yes, I visit it daily), featured my book Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, I was thrilled.

You know The Root, right?  Editor in chief the now infamous Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, the online magazine launched by the Washington Post Company no-less, focusing on the many facets of black culture.  Are you excited now?

imagine crickets chirping

Haven’t heard of The Root?  Apparently most of my colleagues in Minnesota haven’t either, at least to judge from the politely blank stares I received after sharing my news.  Which made me wonder – is cyberspace bridging our cultural divides, or adding more space to them?

Over the past year I’ve delved deeply into cyberspace with the launch of a website, blog, Facebook group and even Twitter account.  What I’ve found is that cyberspace, like “reality space” is divided by class, race, gender, and other disparities.  This is not what the marketing industry has sold us (you know the commercials –Tibetan monks with laptops, poor children in India with eyes aglow from their computer screens).  We’ve been told that technology spells the 'end of geography' and promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy and community.

In 2008 The Washington Post Company bought into that vision, hoping that The Root, despite its theme, would expand its online audience.  If predominately white Minnesota is a litmus test, it hasn’t worked.

Flash forward to 2009, and you’ll find the Internet creates and reflects a distinct spatial structure interlaced with, and often reinforcing, existing separate spheres.  Two weeks ago, CNN.Com/technology published a piece entitled, “Does your social class determine your online social network?”  

A  recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found “friending” on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.  

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods," said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. "They're on their way up, or perhaps not college educated."

By contrast, Mancini said, "Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs," driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.  Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the micro-bloggingsite, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year. 

So who are we friending and linking with anyway? Are we just expanding our comfort zones of race/class folks, reinforcing our own ideas with people who think like us?  How can we use this opportunity of “The Information Age” to actually, well, connect to different people?

I plead guilty to staying in my own circumference of the black academic life blogosphere, but I want to change that.  I’m recommending The Root to my fellow Minnesotans –  what blogs do you all think I should visit?  Let’s swap our daily blog habits for a week –and then I’ll report back on what we find out about each other.  

Who knows, maybe bridging the digital divide begins with us?