memes after

While the presentation did not go as well as myself and the rest of my group had hoped but we did get a pass, and it went so much better than my last one, as this time my group which was made up of myself, Bernard Mac Donagh, Aleksander Smyczynski and Godwill Ndifor, actually used power point and slides to show the project we did for this  culture assignment and unlike our last assignment we didn't split the work. We all made a meme and we all did our own research on all the different type of meme and their history. We combined our efforts and attempted to simplify it for the presentation. However, the lecturer observed that our slides for the presentation were a little too wordy, and that we should simplify it with bullet points next time. We also had a problem with the audio so we couldn't show the videos that we had linked to our project. The material for the research was not difficult to find except for when it came to the African memes, so we decided to change it to memes about Area 51 instead or, more accurately, the storming of Area 51 meme and even then these memes were mostly about how it was going to fail miserably.  This material was much easier to find, and we learned a lot about Area 51 for example it was built during the cold war but it was not until 2013 that it  officially a base became for the CIA.  Also while we were researching the slice of life memes ended up becoming memes about society and about social outcasts in general. 

We also had to read from the slides we made a few times because we had  forgotten what we had to say, we  didn’t have that much time to prepare our work because we thought we would be doing our presentation on Thursday, but we had to do it during are Monday lab so we didn’t get much time to practice and rehearse what to say. But, like before, I hope we will learn from the mistakes we made in this project and the freed back we were given will be invaluable for any future projects. But all in all, this was an interesting project and I learnt a lot about memes and their complex past and history apparently, they have been around since 79 AD during the time of the ancient Roman empire. 

Brief on meme

While I was researching the history of memes and their impact on the internet and on society, I have learned many new and interesting things about memes that I did not know before starting. An example being the fact that the word meme was not used until the 1970s by a man by the name of Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" he said that a meme was an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means. I also learned that they are far older than what I had originally thought, possibly even going as far back as 79 AD during the time of the Roman empire, as what could be described as ancient memes, were found in the ruins of the city of Pompeii. When I first started my research, I thought memes were just a humorous image that was copied and spread rapidly through the use of the internet, but it turns out they have a much deeper meaning contained within them, they can even be used as a type of propaganda if they are used in the correct, or incorrect, manner depending on your point of view.

An example being the memes on modern society and the stereotypes in it. If you take a closer look at them, they can have a much deeper meaning than what is just observed on the surface, they can give a platform to so called social outsiders and their struggle in society. A prime example are the many Joker memes mostly using images from the Batman films and the new Joker movie, according to my research he is meant to represent the outsider, the underestimated and the nobody especially the new Joker.

I also never realized just how much influence memes can have on people and their actions, a perfect example being the storming of Area 51 meme. What started as a joke became an actual event with 150 trying to get into the military base and 1500 attending the related festivals. It makes me think that if people would do something like this because of a joke I can only imagine what would happen if it was used as propaganda. Which is exactly happened during the Yugoslavian war also called the Balkan Civil War. All the participants of the conflict created songs for a genre called turbo-folk, one of the most well know was “Remove Kebab” which was so popular that it became a  became a joke and meme with people all over the internet creating parody's designed make fun of it. 

I feel my group did very well working on this together and have all learned many interesting things while researching for this project, however I am sure there are thing that we can improve on. That we will hopefully be covered in future lectures. 

memes

It was difficult for me at first, finding a group to do the culture assignment with as a large majority of people in my class had already chosen a different type of project or were already in groups of three, which was the most a group could have for an assignment. Eventually I was able to join a group made up of myself Bernard MacDonagh, Aleks Smyczynski and Godwill Ndifor. However I had to ask my lecturer Shawn if it was okay with him because Aleks was in my first group during the creativity assignment and he said at the beginning of the year that we could not work with the same group we were a part of for the last assignment, however he said that it was okay as long I really wasn't able to find a different team to do the assessment with. Once that issue was resolved we all decided to do a project on memes and their history for our culture assignment. More specifically, we decided to work on the underrated memes, the ones that have been forgotten and do not get a lot of attention anymore today and to talk about their effect on social media, society and what kind of effect memes have on the general public.

It was decided that we would work on Yugoslavian war memes, slice of life memes and African memes as well as the history of memes. We would then come together with all the research we had on all four aspects and then integrate our finding into the project. We would then simplify it all into power points to make it easier to present when we had to present it to people in class. However, we were all having a hard time finding any information on memes about Africa so after a while we decided to replace the African meme idea with memes about Area 51. This was much easier as it was a bit more recent, most of them were about the “Storming Area 51” event and how it was going to fail. I was surprised by just how many people actually went to Area 51. Personally, I think most of them just went for the festivals than to actually storm Area 51 itself. Regarding memes about the Yugoslavian war, I was having a difficult time finding memes on the subject what I was able to find was a song and a slice of life meme which eventually became a society meme.