This study aims to comprehend the contextual backgrounds, communicative behaviors, and cultural consequences of South Korean adolescents who are sent to the United States for the purpose of education. Globalization, the recent economic affluence of Koreans, and a long tradition of `education fever,' has created a new trend of sending young children and adolescents alone to the United States in order to learn English. Three different levels of socio-cultural and historical backgrounds are provided in order to explain this phenomenon: the modern Korean perspective on education, the contemporary world of globalization, and Korean developmentalism. This study is composed of four basic research questions: (1) Why are these young adolescents sent to the United States by their parents?, (2) How do they live in the United States where everything is strange to them?, (3) how do they attempt to use new com techs to cope? (4) How successful are they at coping? and (4) How will their cultural identity be shaped? Based on these questions, this study conducts a series of in-depth interviews with young sojourners in Oklahoma City, Boston, and Dallas. The qualitative study, which is largely guided by grounded theory and phenomenology, divides into two main sections: the first section provides contextual background about their everyday lives in the United States. The second section mainly focuses on their communicative behavior and their use of new communication technologies. Findings of this research show that many of these young sojourners are suffering quite traumatically by living without parents and proper peer relationships. Social media have proven to not be adequate replacements for these young people and their normative social and psychological development. Being completely isolated in the US context, these young people spend much time alone in their private space using the Internet and consuming Korean media content. Cultural consequences in relation to their identity formation reflect the complex nature of the globalized world and the limitations of social media to satisfy the social needs of young people. This study is eventually expected to provide a ground for a refutation of the functionalist tradition of intercultural communication research and to develop new perspectives on internationally relocated populations in the age of globalization and advanced technology.