Emergence!

Steven Johnson speaks intently on the importance of emergence and how developing this system is very efficient and self sustaining. In chapter 3 he sets the example of the silk weavers in Florence and how over thousands of years the same market can still be found on the same strip. How does this happen and what are the essential elements that allow the sustenance and the success of such a market.
One of the important notions that Johnson made was that this market had built a sort of consciousness and that the city through out the years had created a self learned system through the information that it shared through out the market. This learning is not something that happened with the success of information that was being provided but also the importance of being able to recognize and respond to changing patterns. The ant hill was a very good example of the efficiency of recognizing and responding to changes. For example, if a branch happened to fall in the middle of their path they would just climb right over it and keep on track. This is a bit different then the silk weavers but the area had gone through wars and plenty of other obstacles and it still stands in the same area.
Location can be very essential to the success of any network no matter where you are. Johnson discusses how the structures can be very important to maintain the emergence of network. One of the problems with this theory is that it does not always apply and the larger the network, the harder it is to maintain a self sustaining emergent system. A successful one is the result of thousands of local interactions which can apply to a small town, city, or even a website but when it comes to applying it to a huge city like Manhattan it doesn’t really interact in the same way and what you tend to get is a form of clustering. Johnson points out that this is the reason the internet, although many technological advances, is not a real good example of emergence.
That clustering becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: potential consumers and employees have an easier time finding the goods and jobs they’re looking for, the shares information makes the clustered businesses more competitive than the isolated ones. Information management is crucial to the advancement of the web and there have been many improvements on it but there is this term that I brought up earlier about learning. The internet, according to Johnson, just reads numbers and that it can even group commonalities in patterns on how people surf the internet. Alexa was a close example of a successful emergent image of the Web but it applied to things like book lovers and “potential mates.” This is a scary topic which includes the topic of artificial intelligence. What is fruitful to take out of this learning aspect of the web is that it will have more of an emergent image once it changes from a complex system into a complex adaptive system. If we, as people, can’t create such a system within our cities I’m not sure how we think we can tame the internet and mold it into an emergent one.