For Tyrell Coley, engagement mostly means entertainment. In December, the 21-year-old New York City supermarket clerk launched a Twitter conversation about “(hash)femalesneedto.” The number sign was a “hashtag” that allowed others to label their tweets and join the discussion.
Within a few hours, (hash)femalesneedto was the top trending topic on Twitter meaning more of the site’s 17 million users were talking about it than anything else. Most comments came from black users and focused on relationships, advising women to do things like “learn sex is not love” and “learn how to love themselves.”
“There’s always something happening on Twitter, some drama, people talking about something,” says Coley. “Twitter is a great social network to kill time. When you’re bored, get on Twitter. Next thing you know you’ll be out of work or whatever. Twitter makes my day go by. That’s why I’m on almost every day.”
Coley is black, and so are most of his 3,756 Twitter followers. So are about 25 percent of all Twitter users, roughly double the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population, according to a February 2010 survey by Edison Research and Arbitron.
Many of Twitter’s trending topics have been fueled by black tweets. Coley has been responsible for several (hash)youcantbeuglyand and (hash)dumbthingspeoplesay also sprang from his iPhone.
He has a desktop computer at home, which he used to apply for his supermarket job. But he uses his phone for 80 percent of his online activity, which is usually watching hip-hop and comedy videos or looking for sneakers on eBay.
This trend is alarming to Anjuan Simmons, a black engineer and technology consultant who blogs, tweets and uses Facebook “more than my wife would like.” He hopes that blacks and Latinos will use their increased web access to create content, not just consume it.
“What are we doing with this access? Are we simply sending eMail, downloading adult content, sending texts for late-night hookups?” Simmons says. “Or are we discussing ideas, talking to people who we would not normally be able to talk to?”
Simmons has made professional connections and found job opportunities through social media. But when he first started using Twitter, the first thing he looked for was other black faces to connect with.
“The African-American community has a built-in social layer,” Simmons says. “We tend to see other African-Americans as family. Even if we haven’t met someone, we often refer to other black people as `brothers’ or `sisters.’
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