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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
