Digital Influx or Mediated Reality: Reconfiguring New Ways of Identity Construction in Yashica Dutt’s <i>Coming Out as Dalit</i>

ABSTRACT Technological advancements and social media platforms have transformed how people think, act, and function, thus redefining the ways users conceptualize themselves. By creating avenues for receiving quick reader feedback, the internet has broken the binary between creative authors and passive readers, thus adding to the author’s role in responding to the written word through their continuous online performance. To perform their ongoing tasks, present-age print authors consciously include social media posts and references to online communities in their texts to reconfigure their digitized identity and perform their ongoing authorship (Murray 2018, 14). Building on these concerns, the paper aims to explore how authors in the digital age use digital media tropes to reconfigure their identity within printed texts. Using Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit as a case study, the paper critically examines the rationale behind the inclusion of social media references and the impact this has on both the author and the readers. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from scholars of Digital Identities, Digital Culture, and the evolving Digital Literary Sphere, the study seeks to understand how digital elements shape the narrative and influence the engagement with the text.