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These are notes I've made while reading. They are idiosyncratic and can in no way be seen as objective or even subjective reviews or summaries. They're simply notes about bits I found interesting or useful. |
Steven Johnson: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Softwareupdate: finished it, will update these notes soon. 3/8 Arrived from amazon yesterday in a huge, dramatic looking white plastic-weave sack. With a small amazon box inside. Guess they don't use the regular post anymore. The point is: I've read 32 pages and it's brilliant! This is fascinating stuff! I'm hooked. By the time I finish this book I'll be spouting essays about blogs as emergent life forms. Oh, John Hiler and Steven Johnson himself already have, I even wrote about it a few weeks back. And I think that's why I ordered the book actually. I'll just be a proud member of the borg then ;) Fascinating bits about the web as being simply disorganised, not self-organising, because of the lack of feedback (page 113 onwards). I think that blogs in practice disprove this, because they do use feedback. I check my referrer logs every day or so, and they show me who has linked to me (i.e. reacted to me) recently. I can then see what the reaction was, and choose to respond back, with a link, usually, which then allows the person who linked to me to see that I reacted to him or her etc. A lovely feedback loop which is probably the main reason that blogs tend to cluster, which is exactly the kind of bottoms-up, systemic emergence that Johnson's talking about. He talks about cranks and flame wars in threaded discussion boards and mailing lists too, arguing that the lurkers upset the self-regulation of the system by not providing feedback. That's why these discussions don't work as well as face to face discussions, which are homeostatic (feedback between agents stabilises the system). This could so easily be related to blogs. A group conversation is a kind of circuit board, with primary inputs coming from the official speakers, and secondary inputs coming from the responses of the audience and other speakers. The primary inputs adjust their signal based on the secondary inputs of group feedback. Human beings - for reasons that we will explore in the final section - are exceptionaly telented at assessing the mental states of other people, both throguh the direct exchanges of spoken language and the more oblique feedback mechanisms of gesture and intonation. This two-way exchange gives our face-to-face group conversations precisely the flexibility and responsiveness that Wiener found lacking in mass communications. (151-152.) Histories of intellectual development - the origin and spread of new ideas - usually come in two types of packages. either the "great man" theory, where a single genius has a eureka moment in the lab or the library and the world is immediately transformed; or the "paradigm shift" theory, where the occupants of the halls of science awake to find an entirely new floor has been built on top of them, and within a few years, everyone is working out of the new offices. Both theories are inadequate. the great-man story ignores the distributed, communal effort that goes into any important intellectual advance, adn the paradigm-shift model has a hard time explaining how the new floor actually gets built. I suspect Mitch Resnick's slime mold simulation may be a better metaphor for the way idea revolutions come about: think of those slime mold cells as investigators in the field; think of those trails as a kind of institutional memory. With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated units, each pursuing its own desultory course. With pheromone trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress - like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail - by publishing their ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas - and before long the system arrives a t a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals. (64) [I don't remember enough about Kuhn and the paradigm shift theory - does this contradict or just supplement Kuhn?] There has to be feedback between agents, cells that change in response to the changes in other cells. (96) Like-minded businesses cluster together [in a city] because there are financial incentives to do so - what academics call economies of agglomeration - enabling craftsmen to share techniques and services that they wouldn't necessarily be able to enjoy on their own. That clustering becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. potential consumers and employees have an easier time finding the goods and jobs they're searching for; the shared information makes the clustered businesses more competetive than the isolated ones. (108) This is a lot like blogs, isn't it? Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. NY: Scribner, 2001. |