fafromnice wrote:

if this is not a meme's form ...

Maybe 'movie' is a successful meme - people seem to like to watch moving pictures and come back for more - and movies certainly can propagandise certain views, but the actual content is all over the place. One should distinguish the content from the form. All movies (and other media, including this post) push a view, which if skilfully expressed is compelling to the recipients. Some media are better for transmitting certain views ("the medium is the message"), and some media tend to be used by particular groups. These days movies are only parts of larger marketing strategies. Merchandise, spin-off TV, comics and advertising from online sites bring in the bucks, and often the non-movie parts contain important aspects of the whole "package" (consider the Matrix trilogy, how the computer game actually is a kind of "Matrix 2.5" film, how the Animatrix and online comics sketch out the back story, and how a set of essays and later books on the philosophy of the movie ensured it got enough traction among the intellectual networks). But the kind of meme attack that we do not have yet is something like a YGBM hack. We have earworm tunes, but producing them is hit-or-miss even to professional pop producers. In EP, advertising has become so good that it is not far away from actual basilisk hacks (or contain them: maybe some marketing companies are hunting down such hacks and reverse-engineering them... Firewall gets nervous when their hack detectors start reacting to the latest ads for Rewire(tm) lifestyle enhancement medichines.)

As guy said above me, memes are ideas but they are compared to "genes" only they affect a large number of people (in fact it's almost like a large number of people acting as one organism- yay stand alone complex ghost in the shell) so yes, memes are around and from a certain perspective have always been around. But with our ever increasing communication and exchange world these "memes" may become more apparent as people can't help but conform (and so create further number of mass social identities). Perhaps memes have always been used but only recently are we becoming aware of our utilization of them. Memes are very interesting but what they imply is so much more interesting: the idea of a gestalt conscious amongst us- why are certain bits of information "viral"? Why do we react in common to certain elements or ideas? (seems to suggest a human condition of sorts- or perhaps just a sentient one)