Guerrilla Meme Campaign!!
Language
One of the learning outcomes from the language unit of study in TOK is understanding and appreciating the power of language to persuade, inform and induce emotion.
Memes are a part of our culture now. They can inform on profound ideas such as the subversive guerrilla meme campaign started by adbusters.org (example above) http://kickitover.org/ designed to “kick over” the neo classical economic paradigms so pervasive in academia and thus macro governmental policy, or–they can describe various “faces” made:
The point is that memes are effective for information transmission due to the fact they’re based on two very important concepts in TOK:
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Shared Knowledge used to construct meaning vs. Personal Knowledge
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Emotion as a Way of Knowing
The first element above is the key to memes. Due to the minimalist nature of memes, they’re only informative/funny/profound/sad/interesting/effective if the perceiving audience has similar shared experiences and shared knowledge. The perceiver of the meme than constructs meaning from the meme utilizing their shared knowledge that is similar to the creator’s. However the perception of the meme doesn’t stop there! Oh no…the perceiver also brings their own personal knowledge to bear on the meme and thus adds meaning.
The second element above, is the focus of our next unit of study–Emotion. All human interaction and perception is mitigated through emotion. Thus, we’ll examine what role emotion plays in knowledge construction while perceiving memes.
YOUR ASSIGNMENT:
Is to identify an issue worthy of our creative and intellectual efforts! We’re going to engage in our own “subversive guerrilla meme war” on some topic worthy of our attack!
We’ll then create our own MEMES and hang them around the school for other students to construct knowledge and have an emotional experience!
THOUGHT TO POWER!!
**Footnote required by The Man:
This intentionally thought provoking and subversive meme campaign is conducted by Mr. K’s TOK class. This assignment illuminates the profundity of speech, both written and visual, as well as illustrates the phenomenon of shared knowledge and the role both play in knowledge construction.