Behind the screens: Imitating, Appropriating, and Decolonising on TikTok
Behind the screens: Imitating, Appropriating, and Decolonising on TikTok The platform of @shinanova Introduction Social media platforms have been praised for allowing users to consume, create, and exchange content dynamically, allowing them to become ‘podusers’ of these contents (Bruns, 2007). Based on these conventional frameworks, social media could offer useful spaces for decolonising dialogues to take place, with members of the digital public sharing and exchanging knowledges in an egalitarian way. However, these frameworks have received heavy criticism in recent years, pointing out that, just as any other social exchange of content and knowledge, social media cannot be separated from their socio-cultural contexts. Instead, these platforms, the content they host, and the dialogues that take place within them, are shaped by questions of access, representation, and the prerequisites and limitations of certain information infrastructures. Below, I present a case study of how one of th...