I think an interesting related avenue of research would be investigating analytically the "emotional" content of the Internet. Johnathan Harris over at http://www.number27.org has made some great strides in the area looking at blog posts and global news content (see http://www.wefeelfine.org and http://www.tenbyten.org). While Harris has some very impressive visualizations of massive amounts of data I believe we are at that point that we can move beyond just looking at massive collections of data and begin to saw something mathematically about the patterns and characteristics that emerge from those sources. With the advent of cheap cloud computing, aka Amazon EC2, such detailed and massive undertakings are now possible by ordinary developers.