Early Indication: African Americans Most Active Content Producers
Their sample is small, developed from mining Pew Internet & American Life Project 2005 research, but early indications from a study by Bartosz Wojdynski and Jessica Smith from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill indicate that:
It’s clear African Americans are sharing content in large numbers.
In fact, African Americans are producing more content proportionally than white groups. Wojdynski and Smith made their presentation entitled: The participatory Web: Demographic predictors of online content creation at the Convergence and Society:The Participatory Web conference at the University of South Carolina. Remember their sample is small, but a good first step in launching more research in this area.
My personal observation at my SoCon conferences at Kennesaw State University, indicate that the African American community at least in the Atlanta metro area is deeply involved in the digital world and in citizen media. However, this is just a personal observation.
Of course, if the Wojdynski and Smith study is a first step in confirming this trend, then we might have great opportunities to reach out to African American youth — especially African American boys — to get them more deeply involved in education by leveraging their interest in producing online content.
