Asian American Poets and the Blogosphere

The blogosphere has demographics of its own. I have noticed that there are many Asian-American poets in the blogosphere. There are oodles of Asian-American poet-bloggers, relatively speaking. That is no accident. Because Asian-Americans (arguably) have a relatively high socioeconomic status and because there is a correlation between socioeconomic status and Internet use, proportionately more Asian-Americans use the Internet and thus there are proportionately more Asian-American bloggers and poet-bloggers vis-a-vis the general population. Also, bloggers tend to be younger, and Asian-Americans are a more youthful population, which partly accounts for the fair number of Latino poet-bloggers as well.

Plus, with both Latino Americans and Asian Americans, some ethnic groups fair better than others socioeconomically and there is a wide spectrum of relative wealth and poverty. For example, the lack of Cambodian-American or Thai-American poet bloggers and poets must have some relation to the group's relatively lower socioeconomic status, which has deprived such groups of access to the Internet and blogosphere (of course, the Internet and blogosphere not exactly being the barest of essentials).

At any rate, I have noticed the lack of African-American poet-bloggers, which on the one hand, is not surprising given the relatively lower level usage of the Internet of African-Americans as a group. But on the other hand, given the fact that there are plenty of middle and upper class African-Americans and African American poets as well, one might find the dearth of African-American poet-bloggers unusual. (The disclaimer here is that I may be totally off-base in this observation, but I don't recall any African-American poet-bloggers, or at least poet-bloggers that have openly proclaimed that they are African-American). There are also the anonymous blogs -- in poetry and elsewhere. I often find it difficult to read anonymous blogs without forming some mental impression of the blogger as well -- at least in terms of gender but perhaps of race, ethnicity, etc. as well. But they really could be anyone demographically.