If gender is a defining characteristic in determining Internet usage, then it is worth looking at other characteristics to see if they have a similar relationship in shaping usage habits. Racial groups were examined to see how likely individuals with different racial identities were to use the Internet. The following figure shows that whites were more likely to use the Internet than not, and Asians and Indians were more likely than that, but Blacks and Latinos are the most likely of all to use the Internet.

Returning to the idea of the knowledge gap, we might have expected the smallest proportion of Internet users within the black/Latino category, not the largest. As typically poor minorities, blacks and Latinos should have had the least exposure to computers previously. History on the diffusion of the telephone shows that minorities were less likely than whites of comparable income levels to have telephones. [Fischer, 1992] The following graph shows how for the Berkeley sample Blacks and Latinos are not using the Internet particularly for economic reasons. For instance, they are the most likely of the three groups to use the Internet to keep in touch with co-workers, hardly something you would expect poor and under-employed people to do, and they are the least likely to use the Internet as a cost-saving measure instead of the telephone or letters.

[NB: "KITW" = Keep In Touch With; "IO" = Instead Of]

On the other hand, the minorities in the sample may not be typical representatives of their racial categories. It could be possible that because they are at the University, that fact and whatever reasons prompted them to be there significantly change their motives for employing the Internet.

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