The Media Lab just put together a new consortium called Viral Communications. When i first heard the title, i became super psyched – someone is finally studying digital virality heads on! But alas, it seems that the focus is to create technology that permits virality rather than actually trying to figure out what makes things viral online. Is anyone other than Jonah Peretti studying meme spread and virality?
Danah,
I just picked up Greg Urban’s Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. It’s a couple of years old, and it’s an anthropologist (pace yr Oct 20 post), so you may already be familiar with it, but Urban rings some of the memetics bells early on.