Tik Tok blog post

Recently, we started a new project that was all about memes and nationalism, with the driving question of “How can we use current memes to comment on the significance and consequences of nationalism around the world?” But before we started to try to answer the driving question, we had to learn what memes and nationalism really are, and we started off learning about nationalism. It gets kind of complicated, but the basic definition of nationalism is the identity or behaviour of a nation. Next we learned about memes, and you may know memes as this:

Or this: And these are memes, but they don’t have to be funny internet pictures. Memes at their simplest are just ideas spread from mind to mind. We also learned about some of Richard Dawkins’s ideas about memes. Richard Dawkins came up with the idea that the selfish gene and laws of Darwinian evolution apply to information and culture. He thought that ideas could spread, reproduce, evolve, mutate, and die. If you think about it, this is what is happening with the internet memes you see online, they spread as more people see them, people make more of them, they mutate into different memes, and once the meme becomes irrelevant and nobody uses it or finds it funny anymore it dies. To show this, we had to make some memes of our own, and we used an app called Tik Tok to do it. If you haven’t heard of Tik Tok before, it’s basically a social media platform for sharing short videos, and it’s popularity has skyrocketed in the past couple years. Lots of the videos are dances, trends, and as with any social media platform, memes. This project was the first time I used Tik Tok, so if you want to find out more about it I found this informative video:

The memes we were making were supposed to replicate memes or dance trends on Tik Tok, and we could make them in groups, so I ended up working with Noah and Thomas. We had to make three memes, and the first one we decided to do was the Canada check meme. This meme is about Canadian stereotypes, and we tried to put as many stereotypes in as we could.

 

The next meme we did was the Minecraft vs Fortnite meme, which is pretty much what the name suggests.

The final meme we did was a different version of a meme where the person has a parrot in Minecraft and then shows their real life parrot.

It was pretty fun to make these Tik Toks, and I might try making some more in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, thanks for reading!