The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
So who is Gennifer Flowers? To be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.