Memes are nothing new. The thought of them was invented in 1976 by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. To him memes were replicators like nucleic acid, leaping from brain to brain by what he called a process of imitation, and they compete for attention.
When I first heard about memes I thought, oh I know what this is, it's just another word for fad. I became aware of fads as a preteen, observing full skirts and saddle shoes. Oops, I'm dating myself for all to see. Fads have that characteristic. But it also demonstrates a difference from meme. A fad can be about physical objects whereas memes are ideas, like the idea social media, perhaps?
Certainly when memes are creatures of the internet, they are entropic. This means their energy has been spent before they reach you. They share this with "information" in general, as defined by Claude Shannon who devised the formula by which information goes across the wire (or though the ether or whatever channel.) Shannon's information is entropic by definition. So the meme is actually entropic before it goes on the wire, not just afterwards.
When you receive cloud memes or pass them on, if they do contain a new thought, it is limited as part of the shallow, lack-of context that is the abstract machine-driven world. Even if a meme is new, it just becomes another cog in the internet thought-ecosystem because it doesn't contain enough energy to change an agenda.
No wonder memes become viral from the cloud. As information is flying in and out across the networks, button-push by button-push, the meme is sufficiently simple to be instantly grasped before it jumps on like a grasshopper.
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