I may not be an expert either, but I do think that Brodie's definition
comes across clear enough...
A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events
such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.
-- Richard Brodie, _Virus of the Mind; the New Science of the Meme_
For an understanding of what memetics is about, consider:
The most important thing that a memes-eye view of the world gives us
is (to paraphrase Dawkins and Dennett) the new insight that some ideas
may be pervasive in our culture simply because they are good
replicators and not becasue they are of any use to the individuals
infected. That is the paradigm shift.
-- "Reed Konsler" <konsler@ascat.harvard.edu>, on the CoV mailing list
As an example of applied memetics (which everyone talks about but almost
nobody does, from what I can see):
What is bedtime for?
Compulsory bedtime has only this purpose: To make children feel
frustrated, excluded from the world, powerless to allocate their
time and resources, and neurotic about sleep, and to make them
insecure about whether their values and priorities carry any
weight at all in the scheme of things, so that when they grow up
and have children they will feel similarly powerless and neurotic
about time, sleep etc., in precisely the way that is required to
make them want to enforce bedtimes upon their own children.
-- David Deutsch <d.deutsch1@physics.oxford.ac.uk>, on the TCS
mailing list
Memetic theory, all summed up in one sentence:
"A scholar is just a library's way of making another library."
ERiC