Right, of course. That clarifies it for me.
This is an interesting tension that all teachers seem to have to deal with. Effective education has to balance novelty with familiarity, and the same is true for humour; but the ideal ratio between novelty and familiarity seem to differ between the two. An unfunny joke might still be effective for learning (maybe it's so unfunny that it's memorable, which is kind of what mnemonics are). And that also seems to be how many memes operate, especially political memes aimed at "mass education" of sorts.
That sounds powerful, but I'm struggling to imagine how exactly it might be done. I would really appreciate a specific example!
I think this is a great way to approach education, and I'm a Deweyan so the experimentalism aspect rings true for me. Inasmuch as knowledge is contextualised by the student's own tendencies and capabilities, the learning produces new knowledge even if it's informationally "unoriginal" (whereas empirical research strives towards information that is "new for all").
Collectivized Memetics was set up when political discussion groups were first emerging on Facebook. We initially started off as a philosophy discussion group, and the participants were all very interested in the politics of online communities. Because we were interested in the philosophy of politics and education, we had a strongly democratic attitude towards how a group should be run. We made our decisions together as a community, through extensive discourse:
We also ran experiments to verify our theories about platform governance, such as creating groups with extremely specific foci and restrictive rulesets. A good example is Described Memes, in which you can only post memes in text. It's a great success, since the group is active and consistently produces high-quality memes even after years since it was first set up. Other examples are more esoteric, like attempting to create societies on multi-player survival games based on different political ideologies (the first one we tried was setting up Plato's Republic on Rust).
We narrowed our focus to the study of memes in 2015, because we were all very interested in developing our own theory of memes. Several meme-related concepts that are in widespread use today, like the layers of irony model, got their start in our community. I didn't realise at the time but I think Postman's vocabulary also made its way into how we discussed memes. For instance, "subversion" is an important concept in how we understood ironic memes (ironic memes subvert pre-ironic memes; meta-ironic memes subvert ironic memes, and so on):
No, it's perfect for the forum. Please do it more!
Also, you can cite anything on this forum, including your own posts. Consider them something like microarticles with a living peer review attached. I want this forum to be a productive and valuable space for the participants, and make this workflow as easy as possible. So if you have a suggestion about how to achieve this (I think radical) way of knowledge production, please tell me about it.
On that note, also please cite other researchers' posts (and let them know) if you do find any of them useful for your own research!