Defining some sort of intrinsic intellectual quality at an useful level to someone who isn't already expected to know the concept we're trying to define seems a lot harder than looking at memetic influence. Are there other big failure modes than getting dominated by popular populists, and are there obvious problems with the idea of screening off the populists by also measuring the interconnected appreciation in the hopefully true elite cluster?

Thinking about this a bit more, it does seem like it might just get us the cluster of people running the mass media instead of the academia. Then again, the mass media refers to the academia a lot more than the academia refers to the mass media, so perhaps we could still get somewhere by following the flow through the clusters.

Depends on your goal. If your goal is to influence the culture, this is a useful definition.