But the catch in this story -- the thing that sets it apart from a similar project in which the kids got a cat -- is that Cordell isn't just your everyday observer of social media. He's a digital-media scholar at Northeastern University who studies the first half of the 19th century, with a particular interest in a kind of relevant question: What makes something go viral? For example, he and his colleagues, computer scientist David Smith and English professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, are currently mining the Library of Congress's collection of 19th-century newspapers, using an algorithm that automatically finds reprinted texts. They've created an index of 45,000 such reprinted texts, and now they're sorting through it to find out which pieces were the most viral, and identify qualities they share.

What can studying viral culture from 200 years ago tell us about viral culture online today?

So the question becomes: What can studying viral culture from 200 years ago tell us about viral culture online today? As it turns out, the impressions Cordell has formed studying a period so long ago are exactly those that would lead you to believe that Twogirlsandapuppy would have a chance at catching on, but would at the same time lead you to dramatically underestimate the velocity and degree to which it would do so. Nineteenth century viral culture is quite like today's Internet culture. And then again, it's something totally different.

"I mean, first of all, we know obviously that cuteness does well on the Internet," Cordell said. In the 19th century? Well, it was a bit different then, as we're talking about texts more so than images, but the kinds of content that did well, at the broadest level of characterization, share qualities with what tends to go viral today. Many of these are obvious: Brevity, comedy, charm, and resonance with cultural values (in the 19th century, those were often religious ones) all increased the likelihood of virality. "Even 200 years ago, it still wasn't complex philosophical treatises that were going viral. It was a short little pithy story that taught you a lesson," Cordell observed.

One of the more surprising ways that the Internet age resembles the pre-Civil War period Cordell studies is not culturally nor technologically, but legally. "The period that I work on is before a lot of modern copyright law went into effect," Cordell told me. "It's kind of a wild west back then, when something that's printed in a newspaper or magazine -- obviously there's no video -- and anyone down the line could simply reappropriate it; they could reprint it; they could attribute it; they could not attribute it. And there was really relatively little anyone could do about it." Publishers and authors fretted about how to control their works, and make sure they could make money from their use.