Stitched-Pinked

This week we read part of the book Emergence by Steven Johnson. The book discusses the theory of emergence. Steven Johnson defines emergence as the low level rules, like behavior and interaction, to form higher level order. There are three examples of emergence that were discussed in the reading. They are an ant colony, Manchester and computer software.

An ant colony has no pacemaker, it is general, a monarch. Every ant has their own specific job and that ant will always do its specific job, no matter what. For some reason the ants all work together and come together by each one doing their own job. They are able to form order. There was one example in the book about how a specific ant colony that was under observation was able to create a “cemetery” and a “landfill.” No one knows if this concept is instilled in the ants brains, but for some reason every ant knew to put the “cemetery” as far away from the colony as possible and to put the “landfill” as far away as possible but opposite the “cemetery.” I just think it’s interesting that the ants knew to have a “cemetery” and a “landfill.” Ant colonies seem to be unplanned, but by looking at the “cemetery” and the “landfill” they seem to have patterns of organization. I was very intrigued by this part of the reading because when I was younger, it’s really dorky, I always thought that there was an ant for every person in the world; like that ant lived the same life as the human. I had a big imagination as a child.

In class we started discussing Manchester and how it was unplanned but had patterns of organization, like the ant colony. However, we quickly switched to discussing suburbia and if it was a form of emergence. I still can’t decide if I think suburbia is a form of emergence. The developments do start as a bottom-up instead of a top-down, I’m just still a little confused. I guess they are because it is its own community that is unplanned. When making suburbia I don’t think the builders are thinking that everyone is going to work together and form this community, but it happens. We also then said that if suburbia is emergence than a trailer park is as well. I’m just wondering about the inner ring of suburbs, the ones that were built first, but then have suburbs past them. I live in an inner ring of suburbs at home. My town was one of the first formed, but now my town feels more apart of Minneapolis than its own town. We have every major highway running through the town. Are these suburbs part of emergence? I guess they could be on some way because they have emerged into the large city even though they started out as small suburbia.

The last topic we discussed was computer software, for example, facebook, and wikipedia. Facebook has emerged into this huge program. It started out simplistic but has evolved and is constantly evolving. Wikipedia is another form of emergence. Anyone can edit wikipedia and the content is a compilation of different sources and materials. The last thing we discussed and actually tried was the book recommendation part of amazon.com. Once you are a registered user you find your favorite book on amazon.com and say you own it. Then you go to the recommendation tab and see what books “they” recommend. If there is a book on the list that you already own then you click own it and refresh the page. The program will automatically recommend more books based on what you own. You can also take the book off of your recommendation list if you know you won’t like it. Eventually the program will change and will know your preferences automatically. We used this in class and it was crazy how accurate the program was at picking books that I would want to read. Some of the books were actually books that I had considered buying.