ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses disconnect between emergent empirical and theoretical approaches to contagion in/and the network with the aim of positing an approach to ‘big’ social data that brings computational methods for social media analysis into closer dialogue with social and digital contagion theory. It aims to suggest the ways in which a theoretically informed digital-methods approach may assist in understanding the networked, viral politics of the hashtag. The advent and growth of large-scale, online social networking has brought with it not only a near-ubiquitous rhetoric of virality, but also a new wave of social contagion research focused on mathematically modeling and visualizing the spread of ‘contagious behavior’ on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The hashtags may enable something akin to a microsociological/actor-network approach to understanding how publics form around these issues at the same time as they present themselves as a trackable and mappable artifact of mimetic activity.
