Informally speaking (though everyone in the field of memetics would like to see more formal structure available), you can generally feel free to substitute the word "idea" for "meme".
"Meme : an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory."
Perhaps more important, in our modern society corporations infect people with those memes they think will maximize their profits , with very little regard for those memes' objective value or truth.
and see Penn Jillettte's lovely comments against Epistemological Hedonism -- "If it feels good, believe it."
Though the fields of Memetics and Sociobiology are both in their infancies, I think a good starting hypothesis is that the appeal of memes has a strong but imperfect sociobiological component, i.e., generally in human history the memes which survived and spread were those which were pragmatically useful, which is to say those which contributed to human survival. However, this is at best a satisficing system, and causes memes to be appealing which are merely "pretty good" rather than "optimum" or "near optimum".
-- a page on this site on / William S. Burroughs /
"Cultural property includes not only land and other tangible property, but ideas, traditions, and other non-tangibles. Cultural property belongs to the cultural group, rather than to an individual. As an individual has the right to control use of his/her property, the cultural group has the right to control the use of its property. Not all people recognize cultural property. As a result some individuals will use another group's cultural properties without permission; often that use is offensive to the cultural group, because their property is used in a way that distorts or is disrespectful to the group's beliefs."
"People who scoff at alien abductions and haunted houses are likely to change their minds if their friends believe, according to a University of Iowa study.
Barry Markovsky, a sociology professor, said his findings explain why belief in astrology, the Bermuda Triangle and other paranormal phenomena can spread quickly, even if they have no basis in fact.
'Most people don't have personal experience with these things, so those beliefs are coming from someone', Markovsky said. 'But people tend not to realize the extent to which they are adopting beliefs of the people around them'."
"This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts' lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the "ideas are viruses" meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn't it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we're just picking the ideas we don't like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of "virus" under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all ... if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer."