16 Feb 2007
Emergence
I have a friend who’s in charge of marketing and business development at a local services company. He reviews various start-up companies looking for business opportunities. Yesterday, someone sent him a “Web 2.0 toolbar” for his review and he accidentally forwarded it to me (instead of information regarding a different company he wanted to talk to me about).
The first impression I got looking at that email was that people are not fully aware that Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is an idea.
Yes, technological tools are used to implement the concepts behind W2.0, but they are not its substance. The substance of W2.0 is in what leading technology and academy gurus call emergent, freeform networking effects.
I won’t go into the formal definitions of these concepts, but I’d like to write about emergence, because I think it’s a very interesting idea. Basically, emergence can happen when a system has the ability to use a few simple rules to build structures. These rules will define what kind of structures are built, and what their level of complexity is.
I always think about evolution in this regard. Life, too, is built out of a relatively simple set of building blocks with rules that allow those blocks to be combined into structures. These structures are then combined into larger structures, more complex with each new cycle.
You have amino acids that make proteins. These make sub cellular structures that go on to create cells, organs and blood vessels, until you get an animal, which is a very complex organism.
Evolution has a tendency to give us unexpected solutions to natural obstacles. This is because of the unpredictable factor of mutations and their impact on the organism. Web2.0 follows these guidelines as well, and a true W2.0 application shows signs of emergence because of it’s very own unpredictable factor – the way human beings decide to use and link the information on the web to other bits of information.
Because of this, no one is ever really able to predict which W2.0 application will be successful. We cannot predict if and when a blog will have many readers, nor can we know which wikis will attract enough people to become successful. Sometimes a W2.0 application reaches critical mass, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Similar to the natural world, in W2.0 we see unexpected results to natural problems. Emergence dictates that the organism will adapt and mutate, sometimes in a counter-intuitive manner, to overcome obstacles. I was amazed once I read this blog post by Don Dodge. It describes search efforts after database guru Jim Gray who went missing while sailing his yacht. Here is a quote found in the post:
A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data…The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass…NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.
and this as well
Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team.
Jim’s friends have accessed satellite information which is usually used by Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth along with a bunch of other data and created a blog site on amazon which gives web users the ability to help locate a missing person at sea. I am fairly certain this has never been done before.
The information was mostly already there, and no new technology was used here. But, a bunch of new connections were made between existing bits of data and the word was put out to thousands of people on the web.
To me, this is a good example of a set of existing structures being linked into a newer, more complex structure. Emergence.
Here is what some people from the coast guard said about it:
Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue
Of course, Jim has a few powerful friends (Amazon CTO and Google CEO among them) but I think this example is valid since it shows the evolving complexity of Web2.0. Other examples may not be as extravagant, but the principle is the same.
So, next time you talk about user generated content, wikis, blogs or (god forbid) Ajax, XMLHTTP and other techno-geek-talk, remember that underlying all of that is a basic concept that has been discussed and researched since the time of Aristotle.
Objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive.
(Emergence, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory)
Jim was never found. After exhausting all possible leads, the coast guard and his friends called the search off.
For a good visual example of emergence, go here.
I have a friend who’s in charge of marketing and business development at a local services company. He reviews various start-up companies looking for business opportunities. Yesterday, someone sent him a “Web 2.0 toolbar” for his review and he accidentally forwarded it to me (instead of information regarding a different company he wanted to talk to me about).
The first impression I got looking at that email was that people are not fully aware that Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is an idea.
Yes, technological tools are used to implement the concepts behind W2.0, but they are not its substance. The substance of W2.0 is in what leading technology and academy gurus call emergent, freeform networking effects.
I won’t go into the formal definitions of these concepts, but I’d like to write about emergence, because I think it’s a very interesting idea. Basically, emergence can happen when a system has the ability to use a few simple rules to build structures. These rules will define what kind of structures are built, and what their level of complexity is.
I always think about evolution in this regard. Life, too, is built out of a relatively simple set of building blocks with rules that allow those blocks to be combined into structures. These structures are then combined into larger structures, more complex with each new cycle.
You have amino acids that make proteins. These make sub cellular structures that go on to create cells, organs and blood vessels, until you get an animal, which is a very complex organism.
Evolution has a tendency to give us unexpected solutions to natural obstacles. This is because of the unpredictable factor of mutations and their impact on the organism. Web2.0 follows these guidelines as well, and a true W2.0 application shows signs of emergence because of it’s very own unpredictable factor – the way human beings decide to use and link the information on the web to other bits of information.
Because of this, no one is ever really able to predict which W2.0 application will be successful. We cannot predict if and when a blog will have many readers, nor can we know which wikis will attract enough people to become successful. Sometimes a W2.0 application reaches critical mass, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Similar to the natural world, in W2.0 we see unexpected results to natural problems. Emergence dictates that the organism will adapt and mutate, sometimes in a counter-intuitive manner, to overcome obstacles. I was amazed once I read this blog post by Don Dodge. It describes search efforts after database guru Jim Gray who went missing while sailing his yacht. Here is a quote found in the post:
A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data…The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass…NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.
and this as well
Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team.
Jim’s friends have accessed satellite information which is usually used by Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth along with a bunch of other data and created a blog site on amazon which gives web users the ability to help locate a missing person at sea. I am fairly certain this has never been done before.
The information was mostly already there, and no new technology was used here. But, a bunch of new connections were made between existing bits of data and the word was put out to thousands of people on the web.
To me, this is a good example of a set of existing structures being linked into a newer, more complex structure. Emergence.
Here is what some people from the coast guard said about it:
Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue
Of course, Jim has a few powerful friends (Amazon CTO and Google CEO among them) but I think this example is valid since it shows the evolving complexity of Web2.0. Other examples may not be as extravagant, but the principle is the same.
So, next time you talk about user generated content, wikis, blogs or (god forbid) Ajax, XMLHTTP and other techno-geek-talk, remember that underlying all of that is a basic concept that has been discussed and researched since the time of Aristotle.
Objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive.
(Emergence, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory)
Jim was never found. After exhausting all possible leads, the coast guard and his friends called the search off.
For a good visual example of emergence, go here.
מאת shamshins נושאים 
Emergence, Freeform, Social Network, Web 2.0 
4 תגובות »