Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

What's the deal with this? It seems to have an entry here https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/turban but it says it's marked as invalid. Why is this? Sure it's mildly offensive to Sikhs I guess but it's nothing worse than Raptor Jesus/Islamic Rage Boy/Scientology (inb4 not a religion) etc…

In fact a large part of the joke is that people are intentionally mistaking Sikhism for other religions (normally Hinduism and Islam).

For anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about here are some examples:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/my-turban-brings-all-the-girls-to-the-yard-an-theyre-like-mohammed-ur-hard/372674547421

http://www.facebook.com/pages/this-is-not-just-a-turban-this-is-an-MS-turban/343554157869

http://www.facebook.com/pages/OMG-Look-How-Short-That-Girls-Turban-Is-What-a-Slag/105399562823885

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bruv-Hold-my-turban-Im-gonna-bang-him/365786743123

http://www.facebook.com/pages/LSMMTUAFIMC-Laughing-so-much-my-turban-unravels-and-falls-in-my-curry/409338936419

http://www.facebook.com/pages/im-too-sexy-for-my-turban/337702595993

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Which-Turban-should-I-wear-to-Kates-party/111786625526908

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Why-did-you-just-send-me-loads-of-crap-sorry-turban-fell-on-my-keyboard/103579533010263

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Partys-been-cancelled-FFS-i-already-bought-a-new-turban/111374398874554

There are countless other examples along the same lines so as you can see this is a definite meme with almost all these groups having 100000+ members.

The Facebook-group-as-meme has always been a little bit a bitter pill for me to swallow for some reason; there's very little actual content creation associated with setup (none at all really if you're just sourcing images from the web) so you don't get any mutation / variation there.

You could argue that the practice of setting up a Facebook group around a particular theme is memetic (Can this X Get More Fans than Y) but there has to be a really strong set of identifiable characteristics which are mutated. In the More Fans than Y example the whole thing is centered around a really particular and identifiable snowclone (like I'm in Your X, Ying Your Z, etc etc). Parts which can be switched and changed.

This set of Turban Related pages is a bit far of a walk to – I think – be called a Meme just yet. I'd be curious to know how you see these sets of pages as being a "definite meme".

Gave me a laugh though.

@Mike It seems possible to argue that Facebook groups are the walled garden equivalent to single topic blogs and probably share their characteristics of "low-memetic, high-virality."

Going to go think about this some more…