In his book, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Walter Mignolo argues that the colonization of literacy happened mainly because indigenous people did not have a written alphabet as the Europeans did. The recent use of social media has led to new forms of literacy and new forms of communication. This project asks: Has social media literacy has become a new form of colonization?
We collected data from social media including memes, advertisements, and images. Then, we used a rubric inspired by Migonolo's book to measure whether a document is oppressive. We measured each document on specific categories, like identity, voice, and space to determine to what degree the document exerted colonial power and why.
