Are We Emergent?

As we enter the last month of the academic year, this is the final assigned blog post in English 201 (I think). Regardless, I will continue to write on this blog, including thoughts on books I read over the summer. We are still reading the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, and our latest reading covered the 2nd and 3rd chapters. Of this latest reading, I took away from it that humans cannot have such emergent systems like ants, but that parts of our everyday lives do contain emergent, or bottom-up systems.

For starters, it is interesting how ants are able to keep a colony growing and functional when only the queen ant lives more than a year. Now, I’m confused what the purpose of the 1 day lifespan of male ants is to begin with, if the queen ant lays all the eggs, so please explain this to me if you know! But how can a 15-year colony work with only 1-year contributions from each ant? I think part of it has to be evolution, that ants simply know their roles as part of being an ant, which keeps everything going. But I think that the lack of a top-down system is very intriguing in doing this, because any examples of human activity I could think of uses the top-down system. For instance, when players graduate from a team, a team still can be good but there are coaches that remain. Or a city may have completely new people in 50 years, but there was always a government. Yet with ants, these structures do not exist and they still grow without a problem. It is the perfect illustration of a bottom-up system because it is solely low-level rules or interactions that build the complex system, so it really doesn’t matter whom the participants are, as long as they follow the rules.

Another idea, which is prominent in many places in the reading, is the idea of local interactions creating large-scale structure. To some degree this is part of the definition of emergence and is stated in the book as “local information can lead to global wisdom” (79). The book continues on in talking about city emergence, and I think that local interactions play a huge role in the structure of a city. In Madison, especially on campus, there is no group or top-level people that tell incoming freshman or ongoing students where they have to stay. But through interactions on a local level, over time there has become neighborhoods or areas on campus that have completely different ideals and characteristics. The Southeast dorms are much livelier, chaotic, and loud than the Lakeshore dorms, and from the custodial perspective I have, they are much dirtier too! I’m quite sure that the supervisor of the Southeast dorms does not recruit partiers or encourage partying, but that area of campus is now livelier as a result. And this is only one example in one city; many cities have areas that emerged out of local interactions and not a government decision.

To say that Madison is an emergent city though, I think would be incorrect. There is in fact a mayor, and numerous boards and councils that make decisions, and zoning laws prohibit certain buildings. In a way, this is a good example of how humans demonstrate emergent qualities, but I do not think is a case of humans being 100% emergent. I sort of stated that in my last blog post, and I still feel this way. The book gave an appealing reason for this, in that “we consciously make decisions...” (97). Unlike the ants, we can take into account the whole system to some degree and we do not base our opinions or decisions solely on small, local interactions. In a way, the human brain is too smart and sophisticated to allow humans to use the ideas of emergence, which is unfortunate because it seems that in principle, emergent systems are some of the best type.

Bottoms-Up!

The book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, is the latest reading that we have embarked on. For starters, I’d like to say that this is my favorite and the most interesting read we have had this semester, as it makes you think about very complex and deep issues without confusing you too much. Through the introduction and first chapter we have read, the major theme is simply introducing the idea of emergence and giving examples of it. Emergence is “the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication” (18) according to the book.

The book goes over some interesting emergent examples, which really help to show the ideas involved. The first one covered is the slime mold example, in which single-celled organisms act together at times and separately at other times. The question though is how do the cells know when to act in concert? The most logical idea would be that there are “pacemaker cells”, or some sort of hierarchy where certain cells that are in charge “tell” the other cells what to do. However, it turns out that “slime mold aggregation is now recognized as a classic case study in bottom-up behavior” (16). Basically, there aren’t any cells in charge, there are a lot of bottom-level activities that go on which somehow create a more complex activity. The ant colony is another given example, in which the colony has no leader but can still develop complex structures of organization through a bottom-up system. It is a non-intuitive way to build complex systems; by having basic rules act in a way that somehow build into the complex system.

In comparison to today’s world, it can be really difficult to understand how this could happen. Our governments, schools, churches, organizations, and even families are based upon authority figures telling lower-level people what to do, and they often tell other people what to do, and so forth down the line. This type of system is a top-down one, completely the opposite of the way slime mold aggregates. The thing that I find interesting is that the bottom-up systems work so well in some types of situations, like the slime mold or ants, but I seriously don’t think humans can do it. Maybe it’s our human nature, but when thinking of an example, I seemed to link bottom-up behavior to that of communism. It seems like a fantastic idea, but when humans try it, there is a sense of everyone not wanting to work together. Undoubtedly there is always someone that wants more than everyone else or doesn’t hold up his or her end of the bargain, resulting in the failing of the system. Apparently, this doesn’t seem to exist in ant colonies or slime mold cells, or at least it does not affect them so much. I really do not have any sort of explanation for this, and I don’t think that just learning from their systems can change human nature, but it sure would be nice if we could.

When reading, I became a little confused about other ways in which emergent theory and the mathematics involved are part of our daily lives now. It is stated that “in recent years our day-to-day life has become overrun with artificial intelligence” (21), and there are “new forms of emergent software being developed today” (22). I seem to be drawing a blank when trying to think up examples of emergent software using bottom-up systems explicitly. If anyone has an example of this that they could share, it might help me understand better how emergence is so prominent in our daily lives.

Cyberculture: It's Everywhere!

This past week, we had two readings, one being Auge’s book about Non-Places. But since I already touched on that in the last post when finding a non-place, I’d like to base this blog off the other short reading we had. In Jeff Rice’s book, Writing About Cool, we read Chapter 14, entitled Cyberculture. Rice writes about the extremely broad amount of media that form cyberculture, which includes websites, email, chat rooms, video games, cell phones, and instant messaging to name a few. Rice goes on to continue his discussion in a slightly different direction, but I think the more interesting idea that he just barely touches on in the beginning is that cyberculture is everywhere. It is so prevalent that he goes on to analyze differences between websites.

Rice gives two examples of websites to talk about cyberspace as hypertext, and I think it shows how important giving examples are. Theory often makes little sense when it is not adapted to real life. So, in relating how cyberculture is all around us, I have my own real life example. I recently got a Playstation 2, solely for the purpose of playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007. I knew the game would involve playing golf, but it is unbelievable how many details you can have in regards to making your own golfer. Just look at this screenshot from the game of Tiger Woods. It is hard to tell if that is really him or not, which symbolizes how much technology is becoming reality. And on top of basically creating any type of golfer you want, you can then play a whole tour season in which you earn money and sponsorships. I think this really speaks to the reading by Sherry Turkle where MUDs became a place for people to express themselves. Video games are so much like that too. If, for example, I enjoyed golf, but was not happy being a male, I can almost live vicariously through a female golfer in the game and make “her” look how I’d want to look. Just so we’re clear, my character is a male, but one can see how people can create personas from this new technology.

I previously had a viewpoint from the Sherry Turkle article and ensuing discussion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with people being able to have an online persona. I wrote it off as everyone has different personalities for different environments. What I think I was failing to realize is that indeed there may be nothing wrong with having multiple personas, but there is harm to be done when you can so easily become consumed into one. After joining the 21^st century and playing video games a little, I realized you can get sucked up into the technology in a sense. I played golf on the game for 6 hours straight, not moving on the couch and drinking soda. This is something I am aware of and yet I didn’t stop playing, and I think to some degree technology in general has this effect. Most of us realize that we are surrounded by this cyberculture, that we get out of a class and immediately check our cell phones. Yet, no one does anything about it and I think that is a problem.

However, Rice brings up another interesting point at the end of Chapter 14, in which he talks about how some websites seem very ambiguous which is so different from typical writing that always has a clear message. Yet, he brings up how at one point, “American literature was classified as too popular or lacking in artistic merit” (153), but now it is an often required class. So, relating this idea to how consumed we are in the cyberculture of the world, maybe it is still too new and too unappreciated. 100 years from now, much of the technology that is consuming us today will not be scaring people anymore, it will just be the norm. The one thing I’m sure of though, is that the cyberculture that we currently live in is changing the world right now and there is no doubt that in the future the world will be different as a result. How it will change and whether the change is good or bad is a different story!

And as a final send off, I think it is absolutely astonishing in the reading where Rice said how William Gibson described the internet in 1984. Gibson described it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...” (144). He basically nailed it right on the head, so it makes you think that every time you read someone predicting future technologies, one of them might be exactly right!

A Local Non-Place: B10 Ingraham

So, I needed to find a local non-place and I went to a place that I thought would be just that. I went to do this assignment in B10 Ingraham, a major lecture hall on campus, as I’m sure many of you know. I did not actually have a class, I just figured I would go there and do this assignment in the back while an intro Econ lecture occurred.

As I was sitting there in the back, I sat in the middle of a row without anyone sitting next to me on either side. The single words that anyone spoke to me were when a guy went to sit on the other side of me, and asked if he could get through. I said, “sure” and did the half get-up to let him through. That was the sole word I spoke between entering the class and leaving. When looking around the room before class started, I would say roughly 80% of the people were not talking to anyone. Many had iPods that they were simply listening to as they sat there, or set up their notebooks. Also, many people were reading the two campus newspapers while waiting for class to start. I even saw two people talking on cell phones a mere 1 minute prior to lecture starting. The other 20% of the people were in fact talking to each other, sometimes in small little groups. The professor arrived 5 minutes prior to the start of lecture, and spent 4 of those minutes setting up the document cam and lecture notes. She spent the last minute scanning the room and just looking at the students.

During the lecture, nearly everybody was taking notes while looking and listening to the lecture being given. Some people were still reading papers or clearly doing something other than pay attention, which I simply cannot understand why them came in the first place. Nobody talked to anyone else during lecture, except the professor occasionally asked the class something and then one person would answer. Of course you couldn’t even hear that person’s answer from the back of the room, so the professor repeated the answer. When the lecture was 2 minutes from being over, slowly everyone started to pack up. Some just closed their notebook, other zipped up their backpacks, and some basically were out of their seats already. The professor then ended a minute early, partially because everyone forced the issue, and everyone got up at once. There was definitely chatter among people, although I would still say a large majority got packed and walked out on their own without talking to anyone.

In terms of Auge’s non-places and the discussion we had in class on Tuesday, I think my observations clearly come to one conclusion. That conclusion is that a place is never solely a place or a non-place. It is determined by how you are using the space, and what perspective you have when you are in the space. From my perspective, I was definitely in a non-place, one which was a temporary space to be in and where even though I was next to hundreds of people, I was essentially in solitude. On top of it, there is no history in the room that I know of or matters as far as I am concerned, and relationships were not made at all. Yet, for those people that are in groups and chatted quite often while in the class, it may be a place for them. They have relationships in the lecture hall, and are not in solitude. It also may be a place for the professor, who very well could have been teaching classes in that lecture hall for 10 years or more, creating a history for her. So, I think lecture halls provide a good viewing space to see how non-places and places are the same spaces, for different people.