A Pew Internet report says that while 56% of Americans have accessed the Internet wirelessly, there’s a stark racial divide in the devices we use. About half of the African-American and English-speaking Hispanic population accesses the Net through cellphones and other handheld devices, but only 28% of white Americans have ever done so.

Three bullet points quoted from the report:

* 48% of Africans Americans have at one time used their mobile device to access the internet for information, emailing, or instant-messaging, half again the national average of 32%.

* 29% of African Americans use the internet on their handheld on an average day, also about half again the national average of 19%.

* Compared with 2007, when 12% of African Americans used the internet on their mobile on the average day, use of the mobile internet is up by 141%.

We can read this in many different ways:

• Mobiles are helping to end the digital racial divide

• Mobiles are extending the digital racial divide by providing second-class Net access to African Americans

• For a far greater percentage of African Americans than white Americans, the Net is less generative and participatory

• We’d better make sure that the carriers become device independent and Net neutral

[Tags: digital_divide mobiles pew race ]

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Pew Internet has a new report out about the role of the Internet in the recent presidential campaign. It confirms that more than half of us went online for info, and many of us were quite active. In fact, here’s one nugget from the report:

Due to demographic differences between the two parties, McCain voters were actually more likely than Obama voters to go online in the first place. However, online Obama supporters were generally more engaged in the online political process than online McCain supporters. Among internet users, Obama voters were more likely to share online political content with others, sign up for updates about the election, donate money to a candidate online, set up political news alerts and sign up online for volunteer activities related to the campaign. Online Obama voters were also out in front when it came to posting their own original political content online–26% of wired Obama voters did this, compared with 15% of online McCain supporters.

Lots of fodder for thought in this survey…

[Tags: election campaign politics pew ]

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Pew’s Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has now added a weekly new media report on what the ol’ blogosphere is blathering on about. That’s you and me, sister. Or what most people indexed by Technorati and Icerocket are talking about, anyway. For example, we seem to have focused a lot on Obama’s inauguration. (Wasn’t that three months ago? Time doesn’t fly when the Republicans are insisting on their old partisan ways.)

And here’s a hasty conclusion from the first week’s report: We bloggers really need to be reading Global Voices in order to get our gazes up from our American innie navels.

[Tags: pew blogging new_media citizen_journalism ]

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John Horrigan of Pew Internet & American Life project wonders what their online research says about possible national broadband policies, if we were ever to have one. The essay begins this way:

…America’s middling standing in world rankings on broadband adoption has served as a call to arms for the new administration to develop a national broadband strategy…

The body of research from the Pew Internet Project, dating to 2000, indicates that online Americans might have one more suggestion: Make sure the internet remains a place where users define what it means to be digitally connected.

John points to many-to-many collaboration as the new wave, and refers us to research showing that while 42% of cell phone users use them for something other than making a call, that number is even higher for minority groups. So, a national broadband policy should not only keep the bands open for innovation, but it should cover wireless devices and other devices. And, suggests John, as e-gov services are rolled out, they ought to be held to a very high standard for usability.

“Only connect“? Nah. Connect everyone, with whatever devices they want, and with the freedom to go where they want and invent what they want.

[Tags: broadband generativity net_neutrality pew john_horrigan ]

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