Mass Phenomenon
Memes in the City
No, Mackay doesn’t use the term meme, but the concept of contagious ideas that self-propagate through a population was as real in the past as it is today. We like to think that our current systems of communication are beyond compare, but the old grapevine of the past was as efficient as any email or IM device is today. Only the scale of the impact has changed.
In Popular Follies of Great Cities, the reader will recognize many themes that occur in today’s world. A phrase that is picked up overnight by half the population only to be lost again just as fast.
Applied to fiction, these ideas can lend depth to your stories but I think that it would be difficult to derive a plot solely from this structure.