Over the past week there has been some concern over whether or not Twitter censors trending topics according to what is deemed controversial or what has bad publicity. The idea is troublesome, but I feel the sentiment is driven more by misunderstanding of how Twitter works and over-projecting the demographics in certain spheres of influence. A statistic that gets thrown around a lot is that 25% of the Twitter population is Black. That by itself is a little troubling. How does one identify the race of a user if they are never asked to self-identify? That metric is a guess at best. It’s also said that “Black Twitter” influences the trending topics on many occasions based on vernacular or slang that we regularly use. Again, that may be true, but are we sure that the “biggest actual consumers of Hip Hop music is the white teenage demographic” clause doesn’t come into play here? Still though that’s not the real issue here. Let’s look at some recent “statistics“. As of July 2011 : There are about 200,000,000 registered twitter users. About half a million new accounts are created daily. About 50% of users update their status every day. 24% of users check their twitter feed several times a day. 61% of tweets are in English. 70% of twitter users are OUTSIDE of the US. 180,000,000 tweets are posted every day. Let’s think about this more… Since only 30% of twitter users are American, it’s reasonable to say that of the Black population, many of them may be non-American as well…especially since they did not specifically say “African American”, but the phenotype “Black” Of that 25% of Black people on Twitter, how many are : High school kids College kids The 24-34 group The 34+ group...

Photo by darkywarky In effort to do a quick poll, I asked my Twitter followers if they had long conversations via text messages on their phones. I got responses back that many did. I found that strange, but I feel that’s because I’m not much of a phone person and am usually tethered to my computer when I’m not sleeping. Texting, Twitter, Tumblr, and other forms of micro-communication technologies seem to often be used in ways they weren’t intended as many people find their ease of use a low barrier of entry. How many times do you see someone tweeting a dozen tweets in a row when going on a rampage of some sort? Or as mentioned earlier, having 20 minute long conversations via text message? Or even using tumblr as a traditional blog rather than as an image/media board of sorts? It raises several questions : Do people know about the various sorts of technology that are available to them? Are appropriate platforms too complicated for those who are not technically inclined? Is email becoming as antiquated as Blackberries snail mail in that it serves a specific purpose but otherwise is not a preferred method of communication? In general, technology does tend to make people lazy as its entire purpose is to automate some manual process to make people’s lives more efficient. Still though, in many cases it seems to be a double edged sword as people are able to hide behind their electronic personas or even exist through “word bytes” while not developing the critical communication skills that face time requires. It makes one wonder…in this age of technology, seemingly high divorce rates, and general apathy, perhaps the results of the industrial and later electronic ages have had a much deeper impact than...