Final meme blog post

We just finished wrapping up our memes project, and this is my final reflection post. This post is going to be about the memes we created to show the history of colonialism and the role nationalism played. I wrote another post about the Tik Tok memes we made, and how they incorporated into our main project, so you should check that post out as well. Both parts of the project started out the same however, with us learning about memes and nationalism. We learned that nationalism is the identity and behaviour of a nation, and that it had lots of consequences in the past and the real world. This was important for our project, because the historical event we were focusing on was the colonization of Africa, which historically was affected a lot by nationalism. We learned a lot about some of the events that happened, and the role nationalism played. I think a general example of nationalism during the colonization of Africa was the racism that took place. Lots of the Europeans doing the colonization looked down on the Africans because they were different than them, which is pretty nationalistic. But that’s just one example of the many ways nationalism was involved in the colonization of Africa, and you might say that nationalism caused it in the first place. After we learned about nationalism and the colonization of Africa, the memes part of the project came into play. We started off by learning about memes themselves, as well as Richard Dawkins theory which I explain in my other post, and simply put we learned that memes are ideas that spread from person to person. Then we started to connect memes to what we had learned previously about nationalism and colonialism, and it was now that we started to answer the driving question: “How can we use current memes to comment on the significance and consequences of nationalism around the world?” We would answer the driving question by making some memes ourselves, except this time around they would be strictly about the colonization of Africa and nationalism. We quickly got to work in making our memes, and we started out by making some ideas. Here are some of my ideas for memes:

After adjusting some of my ideas, I actually got around to creating my memes, and here they are:

I’m not going to explain them, because it’s not a good meme if you have to have someone tell you what it means, but I think these memes answer the driving question, and show how memes are more than just funny internet jokes. Before this project, that’s what I thought memes where, and I barely knew anything about nationalism. Now I know the significance of memes and nationalism in history as well as today, and how they both affect our worldview. That’s about it for this post, so thanks for reading!