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Abstract
Racial identity formation has been extensively studied but lacks an adequate accounting of one of the dominant forms of modern communication: social media interactions. Existing literature acknowledges an implicit and complex relationship between various forms of communication and racial identity formation. Nevertheless, the role of online interactions, and how they affect the development of multi-layered and complex identities, remains largely underexplored. This dissertation explores how the Internet, and its related technologies, provide new forms of communications that facilitate the formation, negotiation, and presentation of racial identity for African American young adults in college. By examining the intersection of communications research and race and ethnicity scholarship, I reveal new mechanisms for racial identity formation, explain how social media interactions moderate existing identity formation processes, and shed light upon new sites where existing processes are enacted. All of these outcomes provide new insight into how the process of identity formation unfolds for black Americans in the “information age”.
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