…blacks use Twitter about twice as much as others do. And because African-American culture is so homogeneous, black users’ hashtags (”#ghettobabynames Weavequisha”) often dominate the trending rankings.
Still, the current popularity of social media among the diverse should remind us of how much the earlier Internet (say, 1990 to 2005) was the golden age of white male Antisocial Media.
The first wave of the Internet liberated the “neurodiverse”: i.e., nerds, mostly white and male. For example, when the Democratic Kos Netroots started getting together, they were surprised to discover that, despite all the pro-diversity rhetoric they’d exchanged, they turned out to be a bunch of middle-aged white guys.
If you’ve ever observed a Wikipedia Editors Meetup, you can see why they don’t get together more often. Yet Wikipedia is a monument to what disproportionately white male homebodies can build. (…)
Or consider the career of the most popular sports pundit to emerge from the online era, Bill Simmons. He has a relatively functional personality, but he revolutionized sportswriting by adopting the nerds’ virtual approach to data-amassing.
