At first glance, a major study released last week showing higher percentages of blacks and Latinos than whites using Twitter seemed like a cyberutopian’s dream come true. The blogosphere applauded what looked like real data showing that social media and the Internet were realizing their potential to bring diverse groups together in a virtual space in a way they wouldn’t in the real world.
But hold those hallelujah’s for a moment. For a reality check, I got in touch with an acquaintance, Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. As co-founder of Global Voices, a nonprofit that recruits bloggers from around the world to write about their communities, he’s done as much as anyone to bring a diverse set of people onto the Web.
While Zuckerman’s résumé might read like that of a digital idealist, he’s really more cyberpragmatist. And his take was sobering: The Internet and social media are reinforcing the silos that we live in, not breaking them down.
“What happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with,” Zuckerman said during a presentation earlier this year at TEDGlobal 2010. “And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys.”
On Monday, I phoned him to discuss the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The phone survey of 2,257 people — the first ever of Twitter’s demographics — found that 18 percent of Latino Internet users are on Twitter, compared with 12 percent for blacks and 5 percent for whites.
The problem, as Zuckerman and others have noted, is that these different groups aren’t talking to each other.
Zuckerman said he noticed this self-segregation phenomenon when he began to watch what are called “trending topics” on Twitter. Users of the service will organize conversations on Twitter by adding a “#” symbol — called a “hashtag” — before a topic name that allow users to track a subject. As I write this, two of the top trending topics on Twitter are Scarlett Johansson (who apparently is getting divorced and is so famous she doesn’t even need to have a hashtag!) and #collegetaughtme.
Now, if you click on the first, you see a stream of mostly white male faces posting tweets about the suddenly available actress. If you click on the second, the faces you see of people posting tweets with that hashtag are predominantly black.
That’s not scientific, but the phenomenon of Twitter topics followed primarily by blacks has been replicated many times over. It’s even unofficially been dubbed “blacktags.”
Earlier this year, two data visualization specialists, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, who have since joined Google, released the results of an experiment they did one weekend. They took two trending topics, #oilspill and #cookout, during Memorial Day weekend and analyzed the races of the profile pics posting tweets to each topic. The first was almost exclusively white, while the second was almost completely black.
Zuckerman did it during the World Cup when he noticed that the phrase “Cala a boca, Galvao” was a trending topic. It’s a Portuguese phrase that translates as “Shut your mouth, Galvao,” referring to a bad Brazilian soccer commentator. Because 11 percent of Brazil’s Internet users are on Twitter (about 5 million people), it had turned into a trending topic.
And yet, how many of Twitter’s white users are aware of these separate conversations?
“You don’t necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space,” Zuckerman said in his TED talk. “It’s also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space.”
Now, don’t mistake Zuckerman for an Internet pessimist. He believes in the power of the Web to build bridges across cultures and races. It’s just that people won’t automatically cross them. To that end, in his work with Global Voices, he has been trying to find people who can translate conversations from one culture and language to another, while helping people in different silos discover the most interesting stuff in other people’s silos.
In Zuckerman’s view, the problem comes with thinking that the Internet is a magic wand that will close cultural divides with just a wave. Instead, he see it as a tool with enormous potential, but one that takes hard work to bridge the gaps between cultures, races and countries.
“If you want Twitter to act as a cultural bridge, you need people to take on that bridging function,” Zuckerman said. “It can be done. It’s just hard as hell. It takes a lot of work.”
Contact Chris O’Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/sjcobrien or www.facebook.com/ChrisOBrienJournalist.
