But whether we called them memes or not, by definition they were. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, where Dawkins coined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".
Memes live in our head and propagate throughout society which is just an emergent phenomena of memes...I loved the selfish gene it's a great book and Dawkins is the man.
One trick was to post memes that don't have jokes, like the one about when I caught the ferry over to Caturday. I needed a new lol for my cat, so, I decided to go to digg, which is what they called fark in those days. So I tied a cheezburger to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a bitcoin, and in those days, bitcoins had pictures of doges on 'em. "Give me five doges for a bitcoin," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a cheezburger on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white castle because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big macs.