Our meme creating, Tik Tok filled project that at some points seemed like it wasn’t school is coming to an end. Now it’s time for me to prove that I have learned and grown my understanding of memes, nationalism and history by creating my final three memes that help me answer the driving question how can we use current memes to comment on the significance and consequences of nationalism around the world? With such a fun project coming to a close let’s jump right into to my learning journey!
I started this project out with milestone one, my need to know questions. What I really did for this milestone was explore the driving question. Of course when I first read the driving question I was shocked because who would have ever thought that memes could be part of school? But after I thought a bit more about it and laid out the questions that helped me understand what I really needed to know I felt more confident that this driving question would help us learn. All in all milestone one was quite a shock but a good shock overall.
Milestone two was examining significance. I was sick for this class, but the basics of the activity which I did later was to asses the significance of nationalism in the Crimean war. We had to answer four questions from a text book that helped us reflect on media and it’s roles in creating a sense of nationalism. Overall this milestone helped me learn to better understand how significant nationalism was in many conflicts world wide.
My answers to milestone 2.
Milestone three was all about showing how Tik Toks represented Dawkins ideas on memes. I did a whole blog post just for this milestone that you can go check out here
I’ll give you a quick recap though. Using our knowledge about Dawkins theory of memes we were tasked with creating three tik toks that could represent his ideas. As someone who had never used the social media app before this turned out to be a lot more challenging then I had thought it would be. Not only did I have to figure out how to show Dawkins theory of memes I also had to deal with learning how to use the app itself. After some trial and error I finally made three decent videos. If you want to hear more about milestone three go check out my blog post. Overall this milestone really gave me a better understanding about memes that would help me out when it came to answering the driving question.
Milestone four was one of my favourites which might seem strange considering that it had nothing to do with memes. What we had to do was to fill out a form that showed the causes and consequences of a certain historic event. Once again we had to asses if it was historically significant but this time we had to show the long term and short term lead up events and then the short term and long term effects it had. I chose to do Hiroshima as I could see the many different aspects and reasons that lead up to the bombing as well as the consequences. This milestone is what helped me prove my understanding of the skills we had practised in our lessons leading up to this.
The form for milestone 4.
Finally we come to milestone five, which is what I’m doing right now! Milestone five is where we make our Tik Toks that answer the driving question. So my answer to the driving question is we can use current memes to comment on significance and consequences of nationalism around the world by combing the knowledge of nationalism we have, humour, sarcasm and a format that people enjoy and connect to into one thing. I demonstrated my answer in the three memes I have made.
The first meme you just saw is a popular meme format used on apps like reddit and Instagram. The quote and image are taken from avengers endgame, and the text above is customized. The way this meme shows my answer to the driving question is by combining the top sentence that I wrote which shows how nationalism sparked the Russian revolution, I then combine some humour in a popular format that helps connect the average person to the meme.
This second meme is a popular drake format, in which you have two pictures. One is saying no and one is saying yes. Usually meme creators are being sarcastic or humorous when they use this format and I did the same thing. The drake character becomes the French monarchs from the French Revolution which was largely fueled by nationalism. The text beside the no photo is the logical solution that the French monarchy should have done. The text beside the yes photo is where the humour element is implemented because the solution they chose is their head being chopped off.
The final meme is a Tik Tok video. This is the one that was the most difficult for me to make as it is a video. I used the I dunno meme format to show the nationalism that fuelled the colonization of Africa. I showed how the Africans were mistreated while also still adding the humour and familiarity of a popular format.
Overall you can see that I have learned a lot from this project about nationalism, significance and memes. I had a great time completing all the milestone for this project and can’t wait for the next humanities project to begin. Thanks for resting my blog I’ll see you guys later!
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