Om Telolet Om: Viral Origins
Jakarta. As the Indonesian "Om Telolet Om" meme continues to take the world by storm, many still wonder how it managed to become a top trending topic worldwide on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in the past few days.
Indonesia does have the highest number of Twitter users in the world, but it was the attention of dance music DJs and Twitter celebs like Zedd, Martin Garrix and DJ Snake which gave the extra push for the catchy phrase to, as they say, "break the internet."
Popular online forum Reddit now even has a "subreddit" dedicated to Om Telolet Om.
But how did the onomatopoeic word go from zero to hero?
As it turns out, Om Telolet Om was not an overnight success.
The meme started in the first half of this year when a bunch of kids on the busy Pantura highway on the north coast of Java — the main route for overnight buses crisscrossing the island — started filming themselves shouting "Om telolet, Om!" (Uncle, honk your horn, Uncle!) at bus drivers passing by, in the hope that they will honk their big air horns in response.
The meme went viral locally in November when a video of it was posted on Facebook.
It quickly morphed into an internet challenge to post videos of yourself and your friends standing on the side of a busy highway and shouting "Om, telolet Om!" at speeding overnight buses.
One small town in Central Java even managed to gather many of its residents at the same spot every evening before sundown to shout the phrase in unison to every passing bus driver.
The phrase has not only inspired Indonesians to get creative, EDM DJs Dillon Francis and Skrillex have even incorporated the phrase that's now on everyone's lips and the sound of bus horns into their mix.
"Telolet" hunting has even become an obsession for some Indonesians, who go around the country on the hunt for big buses with big air horns, and post their #OmTeloletOm videos on social media.
As the #OmTeloletOmChallenge gets more and more extreme, police have started to warn people to be extra careful as they may unwittingly cause a serious traffic accident.
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