Apparently not everyone is succumbing to the lure of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

A study released earlier this week concluded African-Americans prefer to use the Internet for business and not pleasure. The study solely focused on what the authors termed “African-American influentials” (whatever that means) to draw conclusions about the online habits of blacks.

One interesting conclusion was that only 49 percent of these black influentials used Facebook, compared to 76 percent of the general population of people who actively use the Web, whom the study’s authors termed “online influencers.”

“African American-fluentials tend to embrace the Web for business and ‘serious’ pursuits while favoring a range of offline communications tools for social networking,” said Mireille Grangenois, managing director of U.S. Multicultural. “They are twice as likely to use handwritten notes than U.S. e-fluentials but half as likely to write blog entries.”

The tendency to network away from the confines of the Web could be because blacks have a  propensity toward being involved in a physical community, rather than a virtual one.

I recently interviewed one business owner on the West Side of Chicago who told me he was always skeptical when potential investors would try to make contact with him over the phone instead of coming to his restaurant to introduce themselves.

“With us black people, it’s the trust issue,” he said. “We prefer face-to-face contact.”