During the 1990s there was an academic movement called memetics, after Richard Dawkins's word "meme," which at the time meant not just a captioned picture circulating on the Internet but any piece of contagious information. I wrote a summarizing piece for IGMS called "Spelunking the Noosphere."
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=009

And another one about using SF stories to help people think about public policy outcomes.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=011