Such a great sounding word even on its own. Emergence. Like a will"o' the wisp
I was sitting down today with an incredibly clever person, who is working with me on an engagement marketing project which I think is going to be great.
I love talking about technology, philosophically. It fact, technology becomes fascinating when one discusses the true creative applications, and the social consequences of technological change.
Readers of this blog know we think Yochai Benklers book The Wealth of Networks has profound implications for business, organisations and even governments.
Benkler argues
If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the 20th Century industrial producers of information, culture and communications – like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made.
And do you know what? That is exactly what is happening and is going to happen.
So back to Emergence. Jon mentioned a book of the same title, so I went off to investigate
Steven Johnson author the book Emergence believes
what's happening now is that our growing understanding of "bottom-up" intelligence is being channelled towards consumer-level software applications. Emergence, in other words, is becoming something that we interact with directly via our computers.A site such as eBay is a wonderful example of bottom-up software at work, as is the recommendation system of Amazon. If you use Amazon a lot, particularly for books, where they have the greatest amount of data, you'll find that the software is pretty uncanny in its ability to recommend books you'll be interested in. (It's not always so good at predicting what you'll actually like.) That's a great example of emergent intelligence: the system has got smart by looking for patterns in users' purchasing behaviour, and in their limited feedback about the items they've read. It's a kind of collective wisdom, and it's much more fluid and nuanced than the logic we traditionally expect from our computers.
And this is such a great metaphor
One of the other arguments that I make in the book is that cities are information storage and retrieval devices; it's no accident that so many crucial inventions date back to the origins of cities, around 5,000 years ago. Cities have many local reasons for being, but a primary reason for their global success is that they do such a good job of capturing and maximizing good ideas. You come up with a new idea for a plough in rural isolation, and it may well die off with your grandchildren. Bring it to the city centre, with the city's lively connections to the outside world, and the idea lives on for ever.Ideally, that's what the web should be, but it requires us to think about how to get the right information to the right people. The problem with the web is that it's already far larger than the largest city on the planet, and it's growing at an unprecedented clip, despite the recent economic downturn. When the great cities of the world experienced growth spurts, they dealt with the problem of growing too big too fast by developing neighbourhoods - clusters of like-minded people gathering together and sharing their ideas within the larger metropolitan context. The web needs to undergo a similar transformation in order for it to deal with its growth rate. It needs to learn how to cluster.
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