Rating: 
Summary: Excellent...
Review: Very few people have the knowledge and creativity to weave Marshall Macluhan, neural networks and human cognition into a rather cogent theory but Johnson does an admirable job. The sheer quantity of disparate areas of theory that are neatly linked in a highly readable format is rivalled only by the "User Illusion" which could be listed as a good companion to this book.
After reading this I'm hunting down some of the references to learn more and that, to me, is evidence that the book is very thougt-provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing. Full of lots of provocative concepts.
Review: Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson is a compelling argument for higher order emergence from aggregates of lower order units. Like Stuart Kaufman's works on self organizing criticality-though a lot more easily understood than the latter- Johnson's discourse points out that order can be produced from apparent chaos when "rules" are in place and when some critical number of individuals interact with one another following these rules. Probably one of the more interesting living systems the author discusses is the slime mold, that unique creature whose cells can act autonomously as individuals or collectively as a unified whole. I'd heard of this phenomenon before, but at that time no underlying cause was given. Johnson notes that their inherently human hierarchical point of view had led researchers to look for pacemaker cells that dictated when, where, and under what conditions cells would form a collective. After years of looking, it became obvious that either no such cells existed or they were very subtly distinguished from the others. According to the author, recent research suggests a more bottom up organization, with individual cells making local decisions about the need to collectivize and using pheromone trails to attract others to them. Interesting too were the descriptions of emergent systems arising unconsciously from human interactions. The reader interested in modern social problems might benefit from the author's discussion of current top down changes in city organization and urban design. The anthropologist or student of mind/brain research might find his discussion of the rise in human awareness and the concept of self through so-called "mind reading" of interest. For myself, as a student of history, I enjoyed some of his perspectives on the rise of cities, "Cities have a latent purpose as well [as a manifest purpose] to function as information storage and retrieval devices....Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don't die out in rural isolation....And the extraordinary thing again is that this learning emerges without anyone even being aware of it (p. 108-109)." The changes that have occurred because of the feedback systems of the internet and the cable industry are also intriguing. Although like many people I've surfed the Amazon.com website, received my "suggestions" for potential purchases, expressed my likes and dislikes of the various books I've read, voted for reviewers whose critiques have help my decisions, and in short become part of a community of similarly minded people, I've not thought about the overall impact that this type of system creates as it spreads to other situations. Johnson makes some very interesting points regarding a bottom up movement in politics and the media and the loss of control by hierarchies. Unconnected, the individual makes little difference, but connected to others of like mind by way of the internet and feed back loops, the collective has power to change a great deal. Probably the most important point Johnson makes is that much of what arises from this higher order emergence is unpredictable. It might be "good" or "bad" from the point of view of a single unit. As with evolution-one of those situations where this type of action is seen-other types of emergence depend upon random decisions and actions of large numbers of individual units, be they ants, software Sims characters, or cities. One can predict that at some critical number of units the system will go through a "phase transition," suddenly becoming something else. Just what else and what impact that change will have on any one individual is impossible to predict. Intriguing. Full of lots of provocative concepts.
| 
