“The root of that probably goes back to slavery, how we had to have tight connections because the slave masters could easily break up families,” he says. “We needed that sense of family really to protect ourselves during slavery and Jim Crow. That still is woven into, oddly, the fabric of black America to this day. And I think we see this social construct online.”
Facebook and internet access are what most of Miguel Amador’s customers want when they enter his two stores in Latino neighborhoods in Camden, N.J. Five years ago, the majority of his revenue came from music CDs. Now his mobile device sales are up 50 percent from a year ago. His top seller is the MyTouch 4G phone, which costs $499.
Amador immigrated from the Dominican Republic 20 years ago. He uses a laptop at home and a desktop in his store to run his business and update his two Facebook accounts. One account is for personal use he estimates that 75 percent of the people he knows are on Facebook and one is aimed at his customers.
He recognizes that mobile phones are more limited than computers: “Phones are more for entertainment right now. I don’t want to use the word uneducated, but I don’t think (customers) are 100 percent educated on what the internet can do in your life. They just see you can have fun on it.”
“For the Latino community,” he says, “people without internet are missing about 65 percent of the opportunities in life.”
Yet mobile internet access may not be the great equalizer. Aaron Smith, a Pew senior research specialist, says there are obvious limitations on what you can do on a mobile device updating a resume being the classic example.
“Research has shown that people with an actual connection at home, the ability to go online on a computer at home, are more engaged in a lot of different things that people who rely on access from work, a friend’s house, or a phone,” Smith says.
For those Latinos with mobile access, their connections are often related to geography. “Most Latinos here want to communicate with each other, they have family in other places that they want to be connected to,” Amador says. “And they want to be involved in the American community. They see everyone on TV talking about Facebook and Twitter, and they want what other Americans have.”
Yet despite these forces pushing ethnic groups together online, Simmons has seen his social network expand. Only about half of his 2,834 Facebook friends are black, down from about 80 percent when he signed up in 2006.
The early days of the internet were filled with visions of a Utopian space where race would disappear, famously captured by a 1993 New Yorker cartoon with one pooch sitting at a computer saying to another, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
But the reality has turned out much differently, says Peter Chow-White, an assistant communications professor at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the forthcoming anthology “Race After the internet.”
He says there is “absolutely” still a racial divide online, in terms of broadband access and the ability of blacks and Latinos to make their voices widely heard.
“As long as you have structural inequalities in society, you cannot expect to have anything less than that on the internet,” he says. “The internet is not a separate space from the world, it’s intricately connected to everyday life and social institutions.”
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