Minority Voices Are Heard Via Smart Devices

Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, Rekia Boyd, Sean Bell, John Crawford; these are all names of people killed in suspected police brutality and excessive force cases, and all people that have been tweeted about and retweeted on social media. Lower income areas, largely populated by minority groups, have recently, since 2000, had increased access to the internet because of the rise of handheld smart devices, such as cell phones. This is giving this group a voice on social media to bring attention to social issues, such as police brutality.

#Blacktwitter is a hashtag “that has been in nearly since the inception of Twitter. There’s a group of Black techies in New York who attempted to find other Black users in the early days of Twitter,” said Doctor Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of Northern Texas, and an accepted expert on the #blacktwitter movement.

#Blacktwitter has morphed into a hashtag used to denote minority issues and serves to make them searchable. A twitter search for the hashtag brings up many minority voices, many of these speaking about police brutality issues, which have been in the spotlight more and more as currently ninety- one percent of minority households now have access to these smart devices.

According to United Nations Global Pulse, “publically shared information on social networks can show areas of concern and how people feel about job prospects and their future.” It shows this in real time, more quickly and accurately than a census report can.

Hand held smart devices are cheaper and more accessible than computers. They can also be used without paying for broadband, DSL or Dialup internet access.

According to the data from Pew Research centers and the US Census, there has been a rise in cellphone ownership since 2000, and of that cell phone ownership, a rise in smartphone ownership. In 2013, ninety percent of adults in the US had cell phones, according to the US Census data. Smartphones have internet connectivity. According to the data, demographically, the groups with the highest rate of smartphone ownership are Whites and Asians. The lowest are Black and Hispanics.

Ninety one percent of black, non-Hispanic households have only handheld devices, while only thirty two percent of white households and twenty two percent of Asian households have no laptop or pc computers, according to a Pew Research study.

The US Census data that shows that home computer ownership and access to the internet is most prevalent in young, white/Asian, high income homes, and more prevalent in metropolitan area and high levels of education

Table 1. Computer and Internet Use for Households: 2013 (In thousands. For information on confidentiality protection, sampling error, non-sampling error, and definitions, see www.census.gov/acs/www)

What does this mean? Minority black Americans now have widespread access to internet because of their handheld smart devices such as mobile smart phones and tablets. These devices are cheaper and can connect more easily to the internet, through data or wifi, but wifi is not required to access the internet. Black minorities are using the internet and social media, and have a voice through these channels on social issues. Type the hashtag #Ferguson into Twitter, and you will see opinions, outrage, calls to action, and discussion between twitter users, many of whom are black. These voices are heard by everyone, as is evidenced by the black lives matter hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, becoming viral. This hashtag became the slogan of the movement against police brutality and was discussed in every news outlet from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post.

One of Dr. Clarks tweets, “Beware anyone who says the problem is the public’s demand for information #FergusonDecision,” was retweeted over a million times.