Over the past few days, you might have seen some unusual things popping up on your Facebook news feed. The latest trend to hit the social media giant is fan pages for internet “memes” centered on different colleges. Think of memes as inside jokes that only a select group of people will understand. The “Temple University Memes” site has only been live for a week and it already has over 6,000 likes.
People can submit their own “memes” to the page and, of course, read and comment on the postings of others. Topics on Temple’s page vary from other students’ actions in the TECH Center to common occurrences on campus. However, are these little inside jokes going from funny to offensive?
While some “memes” accurately reflect life at Temple, such as the e-mail from “the classmate you don’t know” and the “beep boop beep boop” sound you hear when you cross Broad Street, others present quite offensive ideas that negatively reflect the Temple community.
Some of the “memes” have begun to comment on the neighborhood surrounding the campus and the people living in it. One in particular has a small red box representing Temple in the center, surrounded by other sections titled “Murderton”, “Burglaryburg” and “Rapeville”. Most of these more offensive “memes” are submissions, rather than posts by the actual creators, but they still show up on the page.
Perhaps these new submissions are just from a selective few, but hopefully the page will soon return to a normal, source of entertainment for former, current, and future Owls.