e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: emergence

  • Is Johnson's "Clustering Emergence" Really Small-world Network Formation?

    I was thinking some more last night about Stephen Johnson’s new position that there are separate types of clustering and adaptive emergence as I was reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked (which I am enjoying immensely, by the way; more on that in a later post). I suddenly had a flash of intuition that what Johnson now refers to as “clustering” emergence in the Dean campaign and other political grassroots events may just be the formation of a small-world network.

    Here’s the evidence:

    • The Dean campaign achieved incredibly rich, fast, and robust communication with its grass roots, just as you would expect in a small-world network.
    • The Blog For America site acted as a network hub, which is just the kind of catalyst you need to turn a normal grassroots network into a small-world network.
    • The sense that this powerful, organic “system” suddenly “emerged” is consistent with the kind of sudden and dramatic phase transition that is typical at the moment of small-world network formation.

    Intriguing, huh?

    It might be interesting to graph the Dean campaign’s network of support web sites, blogs, etc., and compare it to the other campaigns. Did Dean’s support web conform to a power law? Did Kerry’s? Bush’s? One aspect that makes this harder is that, with MeetUp factored into the picture, the network extends outside the Internet in some significant ways and therefore might be a lot harder to map.

  • Steven Johnson Speaks (Again) on Emergence in the Dean Campaign

    Johnson has a chapter out [PDF] in a new online book about “Extreme Democracy,” which includes contributing luminaries such as Clay Shirky and Joi Ito. In his chapter, Johnson clarifies how his thoughts about emergence in democracy have evolved since his book came out (and since the Dean campaign crashed and burned):

    Watching the Dean campaign’s meteoric rise and fall helped me to see some of my original ideas about emergence with a new clarity, particularly as they related to collective behavior among humans. I think now that I was really forcing two kinds of emergence to coexist under a single umbrella term. Imagine it as the difference between clustering and coping. Some simpler emergent systems are good at forming crowds; other, more complex ones, are good at regulating the overall state of the system, adapting to new challenges, evolving in response to opportunities. Sometimes, I suspect, it’s helpful to blur the distinctions between clustering and coping for simplicity’s sake. But when you subject them to the intense scrutiny and pressure of a national political campaign, the fault lines inevitably appear. Right now, emergent politics is brilliant at clustering, but clustering is not enough to get a national candidate elected. In fact, without the right coping mechanisms in place, clustering can sometimes work against your interests. You need crowds to get elected to public office, but without more complex forms of self-regulation, crowds can quickly turn into riots. And riots don’t win elections.

    He goes on to suggest that the Dean campaign (and, by extension, current forms of emergence in politics in general) was excellent at bringing groups of people together, i.e., “clustering,” but lousy at responding to changing circumstances, i.e., “self-regulation.” The Dean campaign may have been a complex system, but it was not a complex adaptive system.

    As a side note, Johnson cites al Qaida as a good example of emergent organization, just as I had suggested in an earlier post (though I think we know little enough about the top-down vs. bottom-up organization of the group that this remains to be proven definitively).

    This is a good read.

  • Designing for Emergent Behaviors in Humans

    This post on a new kind of group performance art gives a good example of how emergence can work in groups of humans. Key here, again, is that the players have no clear sense of the larger emergent pattern, i.e., there is no “learning” on the part of individuals, though there may be adaptation by the group as a whole.

    How might this be useful? Imagine situations where the individuals can’t know what their counterparts are doing. The first (and scariest) example that springs to mind is al Qaida. We don’t know what their communications are like, but the typical structure of a guerilla or terrorist group is around cells that don’t know even about the existence of other cells. That protects the organization should one group get caught. The down-side, of course, is lack of the ability to coordinate. Unless, that is, you engineer in some behaviors that only require each cell to respond to simple cues from easily observable actions that other nearby cells are taking (e.g., terrorist attacks). I’m not sure what those rules would look like (and I’m not sure that I would post them on the Internet even if I did), but the idea is that emergence is a useful tool where coordinated global information sharing is not practical.

    Another more mundane example would be inside a modern large corporation or govermental agency. While global communication is often highly desireable, it rarely happens in a consistent and coordinated manner. If workers (and even workgroups and offices) follow rules that mandate behavior changes based on relatively simple and easily obtainable cues from their local environment about what their immediate neighbors within the organization are doing and experiencing, it’s possible that you can have the entire organization respond as if there were global communication and coordination.

    I realize this is all vague; I’m thinking out loud at the moment. But this idea of engineered emergence in communication-hostile environments is how I’m thinking that emergence will ultimately be a useful concept in knowledge management.