“How to be Black” grabs SXSW audience

Baratunde Thurston is The Onion’s Web and Politics editor. Thurston — best known as @baratunde on Twitter — is a comedian who understands the power of bar charts.

Sunday afternoon at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Thurston gave a just-the-right-amount-of-edgy talk on the Internet’s influence on black Americans, and vice versa.

While we wait for video to become available, @baratunde’s slides are online. How do black people differ from white people on the Internet? They use Yahoo more than Google. They hit MySpace more than Wikipedia. Compared to the public at large, they use Ask.com more, and MSN less.

According to Pew Internet Research, blacks and Hispanics are equally ahead of white folks on mobile Internet use. Twenty-eight percent of U.S. whites have ever used the Internet on a mobile device, and 17 percent have done so in the past day. Among blacks and Hispanics, 47 to 48 percent have used the mobile Internet, 29 percent within the past day.

But here’s Thurston’s kicker: “When tethered and wireless access are considered together, the gaps in online engagement between whites and blacks largely disappears.” I hate to be a statistical stereotype, but yes, I’m currently sitting at a desktop Mac instead of posting this from my phone.