Hi Tom, I love memes, they've been around forever but were named only recently.
Read Dawkins, read Blackmore, there's tons of good info on the internet.
Individuals and institutions of power have been using them since always.
I paraphrase:
"Give us a child until he's seven years old and he's ours forever"  I think the Jesuits came up with that--smart guys and dangerous because of it.
What all positions of power do is implant memes--ideas--in the minds of the impressionable.
It can be done intentionally with good or bad effect or accidentally, likewise.

Memes, big ones and little ones, flood the atmosphere. 
It behooves a human to be careful what he accepts into his brain and from time to time you need to rustle around in there to see if your personal memes need rearranging or disposal.
Memes are not bad or good.  They are powerful and scary though.
Hence book burning and banning (books are full of the things).
Be careful to examine the memes that belong to you.
And be careful of the memes you implant in others.

I didn't see your post until this morning, Tom.  Sometimes if people are posting like mad new posts get pushed down fast and then...poof gone.
I was reading another thread in the Study and found your meme question.  I am a lover of memes and what they can do, they're so easy and so subtle and so slippery.
What does Dawkins say about defining a meme?
The other gal is Susan Blackmore, she studies consciousness and that's where the memes are.  I'm going to have a look at the latest literature and see what's new on the subject.
Implanting memes is interesting.  For instance: 
1. A teenager brings a boy home to meet her mom and her mom considers him unsuitable--she rages she screams she forbids her to see him she calls a plague on his house.
   
2. Same scenario:  Mom feels boy is unsuitable  lifts her chin, regards him for a moment, says "Hm...", turns and leaves them alone.

Same meme projected differently--he's not good enough.  Which one does the teenager take more seriously?
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And memes are not just words they're notes of music and works of art  &  what you see on the way to work in the morning.  Whatever bends you this way or that, what ever changes you a little or a lot.  Interesting stuff and primal.  In the beginning was the meme.

Here's a definition from Wikipedia:
"Meme" ( /ˈmiːm/[1]) is a relatively newly-coined term that identifies ideas, behaviors or styles that spread from person to person within a culture.[2] The concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit ideas and belief information.

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]