The revolution just might be digitized: toward a critical race theory of the African-American igeneration's online social enfranchisement

This study explores the online social experiences of the African American iGeneration given its recent integration into online social networking ecologies that allow for increased access and use of key forms of social networking capital that enable greater autonomy in students’ network orientation toward power, privilege, and enfranchisement in both online and offline networks. This study specifically examines how African-American, iGeneration youth both access and use key forms of networking capital in their respective network orientations particularly in light of their limited access and use of key forms social capital within offline social networks. This study contends that the contrast between the use and access of key forms of networking capital in online and offline social networks affects both the social models and dynamics of power between African American, iGeneration youth and social authorities in their immediate offline networks. In many respects, this split in the locus of socialization not only strengthens features of oppositional identity in individual members of the African American iGeneration, it vests them with a level of oppositional agency able to generate varying degrees of transformative resistance to present configurations of social dynamics within their offline networks. Thus, in some ways, the role of online social networks has reconfigured both the social roles and outcomes for African-American students in the context of educational system and other key social networks of dominant American society.