UC Santa Barbara

Using Black Twitter as a case study, this dissertation explores whether collective memory contributes to the formation of community, sense of place, and ingroup identity in digital environments. Although much attention has been paid to community building factors (e.g., social interactions, intimate sharing) the viewing and sharing of collective memory has been somewhat underexplored experimentally as a possible contributor to the maintenance of community. In short, this dissertation sought to explore a few enduring questions: what is community and how is it maintained? Rooted in scholarship on digital community, collective memory studies, Black geographies, and communication, I draw on collective memory theory (Halbwachs, 1992/2020; Assmann, 2011), sense of community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986) and sense of place (Relph, 1997) to understand how collective memory may affect both the relational and geographic aspects of community (Puddifoot, 1995). Additionally, the qualitative portion of this study is historically founded in a history of Black publics (e.g., the Black Press) and is analyzed alongside Procter’s (2005) notion of spirit of community that is affective and practice-based, and Buber’s “narrow ridge” (as cited in Arnett, 1986) where individuals balance individual agency and collective responsibility. Drawing on this literature, I explore how memory and media come together to affect community and place.To investigate how community identity is sustained online via memory, I utilized a mixed methods design where quantitative data and qualitative data were collected concurrently. The quantitative portion consisted of a 4X4 experimental design (N = 365) in which participants were exposed to different types of collective memory content and prompted to imagine various sharing behaviors. Although hypothesized effects on sense of community and sense of place were not supported, post-hoc analyses revealed a significant effect of sharing such that the viewing condition reported the lowest sense of community and the direct messaging conditions reported the highest sense of place.The qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended responses collected during the experimental survey examined how participants made meaning of collective memories from Black Twitter. Qualitative analysis revealed tensions in how participants negotiated identity (e.g., balancing joy and trauma; sharing and withholding) as they positioned Black Twitter as a site of cultural memory and historical consciousness. While the quantitative data explored relationships between memory exposure, sharing, and psychosocial outcomes, the qualitative data contextualized those relationships in lived experience and rhetoric. Taken together, the quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that community building by way of collective memory occurs as an active process of social interaction and negotiation, rather than through passive exposure. This dissertation contributes to an understanding of placemaking and digital identity and offers a foundation for future research on mediated memory, especially in digital publics formed by historically oppressed communities.