The day it was posted here I made sure to check out /b/. There was a lot of image spamming in multiple threads consisting of different images of different famous characters with the image's color balance, brightness, and contrast tweaked in multiple ways. They all tended to carry the same theme of only creating different instances of the same image with these tonality adjustments.
So there's definitely a common theme happening that many are imitating. It's a simple idea that many are imitating in a contagious fashion. But it's still too early to call it a meme for a multitude of reasons.
The first is that it's too fresh. A good meme has a history of performance that can be tracked. At this point it is a handful of events with massive floods of derivatives. That doesn't constitute a meme though because a meme has to be self-propigating. That is, it has to become an idea so contagious that there is no spamming or flooding needed. People should be drawn to it, not forced into it.
But there have been memes in the past that start out in a hail storm, but because they eventually endure over a long period of time with significant interest, they can be shown to be an idea that exists to sustain it's own existance. That's when something becomes a meme.
