I try to avoid getting too personal in my blog, but it seems that I, as a blogger, tend to migrate toward the personal stuff, whether it be serious or exciting or mundane. It's what I like to read and what I like to write. So without divulging too many uninteresting personal facts, it's been a rough week: The Illness, the Literary Studies paper, and the unfortunate (though not unexpected) death of a member of my boyfriend's family. But. The Blog must go on.
This quote stuck with me:
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component
parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. Doesn't that sort of
define blogging? Or maybe it's better said this way: Doesn't that describe the essence of blogs? The whole blogosphere is smarter than the sum of its parts in the sense that its components, even the most highly regarded or complex blogs, operate very simply. A blogger types and links and posts in his or her small block of the internet, and that small block connects with other blocks through links and through the information it spreads, and those other blocks connect to still other blocks. And when you zoom out you see this massive information-spreading system, far more complex than any individual blog.
Emergence is probably why I can spend hours on the internet when only intending to check my email or check my friend's blog.
Also,
Chris made a great point about emergence and homework. I whole-heartedly agree.
Johnson's point about signal-to-noise is interesting. Obviously, emergence lends itself to a cacophony of opinions, useful information, some use
less information, problems with communication, unwanted messages, etc. What's interesting is that part about Slashdot:
Malda and his crew didn't have the luxury of putting a bunch of people on staff to do it, and I don't think they were temperamentally inclined to do that anyway. They thought it would be better to let the community do it, and follow an open source model in developing a community itself. And so they built the karma system where everything was evaluated by other members of the community, and if you contributed a lot your karma increases. Moderation filters enable you to look at highly rated things and eliminate things that are not highly rated by the community. And it created a kind of currency within the system that enabled quality contributions to rise to the surface.
I wonder: If you try to develop a sort of rating system in blogs, will it eventually become chaotic too? Can everyone agree on what's high quality? I'm not sure about that one.
All of this has me thinking not just about blogs but about forum as well. Forums (fan forums, cooking forums, forums about movie stars, whatever strikes your fancy) are a form of emergence, wouldn't you say? I mean, The X-Files forum is
monstrous, and I've gotten lost in it many a day.
...Guess I let the geek out of the bag with that closing line.Labels: Blogging, Internet, The X-Files
