Recently, two intiatives have been launched to study the "emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale" :

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI)and the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI).

Both centers aim to help structuring a field still poorly covered by science. These highly interdisciplinary programs may well deliver findings of tremendous interest for WAYS organization and future.

Web Science Research Initiative

"WSRI is a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. The goal of WSRI is to facilitate and produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to inform the future design and use of the World Wide Web."
WSRI plans to address questions such as:
-how do we access information and assess its reliability?
-By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules?
-How will we preserve the Web over time?

Web Science:
http://www.webscience.org/

Center for Collective Intelligence

"New communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities."

Basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

http://cci.mit.edu/