For todays post I will be talking about Tik Tok and how it incorporated into or main project. If you want to know more about the whole project and what we have done so far with memes and other Tik Toks, then click HERE and read another post that I have done on this topic. So for this post I will mainly focusing on some memes that we created to show problems in historical nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. To conclude the post I will explain why I think memes and Tik Tok were used in this project instead of normal textbooks or something like that.

 I mentioned a second post about just Tik Tok and how it added to our project on memes, well in a way that was a small stepping stone for this post. In that one we were busy making Tik Toks and learning about what they were and how they work, but they were just regular ones, they did not have anything to do with nationalism, so now we had a harder task of creating a meme that also shows important historical issues involving nationalism.

Then we started making actual memes. These memes had to communicate how nationalism has impacted different people over history, now we had been studying things like the colonialism in Africa in 1914 and how thing really went down the drain as soon as the Europeans showed up. Adding on to that we also learned how Africa was divided by the Europeans with no African consent. Since we had been learning about these events we had lots of examples to use in our memes.

I had some really good ideas for some basic memes that I would edit to fit my topic because as I have mentioned before memes need to change and mutate in order to stay relevant. I chose to focus more around the Africans and what happened when the Europeans came over with a colonialist mind set. When used correctly these examples could fit with some of the current memes. Here are some of my notes:

When I got my notes approved I started to work on the the first draft of memes, but I soon found myself adding more and more to the memes until they were a completely different type of meme now, which isn’t a bad thing. Here are some of the finished memes.

 

The last thing I will talk about is why I think we used memes to show these very important events even though they are thought of as childish humour. For starters memes are not always childish, there are plenty out there that actually show how real life events that have major significance and can be shown in only a few pictures/ seconds of video, they are also a great challenge because it forces us to understand our topic so well that we would be able to sum it up in only one or two pictures ( memes). Also the memes and Tik Tok videos themselves are quite interesting because they are irresistible for some people even though they are only pictures or videos, so looking closer at them was also interesting and helped me understand the topic I was studying, so in other words we had a second challenge of understanding the concept of memes and Tik Tok.

Overall this project gave me a unique perspective on memes and on nationalism. Before this project started I had a faint idea of what nationalism is and I knew memes as just forms of entertainment, but after taking a closer look at both I realize that they are more complex than what meets the eye.

 

That’s all for now