In defense of the blogosphere in general and the memes issue in particular, it seems naive to think that we should dismiss online discourse as "terrible" simply because X percent of the discourse breaks down into meaningless-ness. Much of face-to-face interaction is equally meaningless, simple social mores that won't go away. "Cold enough for you?" is just one shining example. Now, it could be agrued that sychronous cyber-discourse is terrible. But as far as asynchronous discourse goes, frankly, the blogosphere does that as well as any medium thus far.

Paul Medenwaldt