Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Hardcover

Johnson, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068486875X ISBN 13: 9780684868752

Publisher: Scribner, 2001

Synopsis

Drawing on urban studies, neuroscience, computer games, cultural criticism, and more, a thought-provoking book combines scientific theory, cultural analysis, and reportage to shed new light on the cutting-edge theory of emergence and its impact on the world. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the cofounder of Feed (www.feedmag.com), the Internet's acclaimed voice on technology, science, and culture. Newsweek named him one of their "50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet," and The Village Voice chose him as one of their nine "Writers on the Verge 2000." Johnson's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Lingua Franca, Harper's, Brill's Content, and the London Guardian. He holds a B.A. in semiotics from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia, and he lives in New York City.

Reviews

To have the highly touted editor of a highly touted Web culture organ writing about the innate smartness of interconnectivity seems like a hip, winning combination unless that journal becomes the latest dot-com casualty. Feed, of which Johnson was cofounder and editor-in-chief, recently announced it was shuttering its windows, which should make for a less exuberant launch for his second bricks-and-mortar title, following 1997's Interface Culture. Yet the book's premise and execution make it compelling, even without the backstory. In a paradigmatic example here, ants, without leaders or explicit laws, organize themselves into highly complex colonies that adapt to the environment as a single entity, altering size and behavior to suit conditions exhibiting a weird collective intelligence, or what has come to be called emergence. In the first two parts of the book, Johnson ranges over historical examples of such smart interconnectivity, from the silk trade in medieval Florence to the birth of the software industry and to computer programs that produce their own software offspring, or passively map the Web by "watching" a user pool. Johnson's tone is light and friendly, and he has a journalistic gift for wrapping up complex ideas with a deft line: "you don't want one of the neurons in your brain to suddenly become sentient." In the third section, which bears whiffs of '90s exuberance, Johnson weighs the impact of Web sites like Napster, eBay and Slashdot, predicting the creation of a brave, new media world in which self-organizing clusters of shared interests structure the entertainment industry. The wide scope of the book may leave some readers wanting greater detail, but it does an excellent job of putting the Web into historical and biological context, with no dot.com diminishment. (Sept. 19) Forecast: All press is good press, so the failure of Feed at least makes a compelling hook for reviews, which should be extensive. A memoir of the author's Feed years can't be far behind, but in the meantime this should sell solidly, with a possible breakout if Johnson's media friends get behind it fully.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Johnson makes sense of the cutting-edge theory of emergence, exploring the ways intelligent systems are built from small, unintelligent elements without control from above. Johnson is a journalist for an online magazine; emergence is being touted as the coming paradigm for the Internet. Johnson discerns emergent qualities on the Internet by using analogies from the biological world, so it is with the world of slime molds and ant colonies that Johnson repairs to report on people who have teased out rules of emergence. Entomologist Deborah Gordon tells him about the iterative acts of ants that produce the meta-behavior of colonies in Arizona (a reprise for readers of her Ants at Work, 1999). Cities also exhibit emergence, with Johnson reminding us of what Engels wrote about Manchester and Jane Jacobs about New York in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). From these and other examples, such as the popular computer game SimCity, the Web site eBay, or a cyber-community called slashdot.com, Johnson generalizes five rules of "bottom-up" behavior in self-organizing systems. A lively snapshot of current trends. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068486875X
• ISBN 13: 9780684868752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288