Sadly the meme of memetics has been on the wane in recent years, largely because - compared to its cousin genetics - its code was infinitely messier and more difficult to parse. Genetics has an alphabet of four letters with all words (or codons) restricted to three letters. Even if you only looked at memes in the English language, you're talking 26 letters and almost half a million words.
Memetics, then, may have been stunted by the limits of data crunching power.
That could very well change in the near future as super-computing makes processing terabytes of data easier every day. In fact, network theorists may have already emerged as the next generation of memeticians. Studies that track ideas spreading via Twitter, blogposts and FB keep cropping up. (Here's a recent example that used fancy statistical analysis on 580 million tweets.) It may not be long before we understand how ideas spread as well as we do viruses and genetic mutations.
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