I’m reading Emergence, by Steven Johnson. I’m not terribly impressed in general, it reads at the depth of, well, a WIRED article. Which is fine when its free and article-length, but is a bit frustrating in a book-length format for which I paid.
There’s one particular point he makes which is not only flawed, but really quite sloppy. He’s discussing if the World Wide Web has the potential to form a self-organizing emergence like a metropolis or Teillhard’s noosphere, and points out:
“Plenty of decentralized systems in the real world spontaneously generate structure as they increase in size: cities organize into neighborhoods or satellites; the neural connections of our brains develop extraordinarily specialized regions. Has the Web followed a comparable path of development over the past few years? Is the Web becoming more organized as it grows?
You need only take a quick look at the NASDAQ most active list to see that the answer is an unequivocal no. The portals and the search engines exist in the first place because the Web is a tremendously disorganized space…”
OK, so first, the assumption that the Web is unorganized and has no structure is just wrong. See Albert-László Barabási’s Linked, or any one or the multitudes of visualizations of interactions between blogs to disprove the proposed lack of structure.
The killer is what Johnson goes on to discuss, which is the various projects to track people’s surfing habits, as a way to “introduce” that structure which cities have and he claims the Web lacks. He never seems to make the connection that the sidewalks of a city, like the links between websites, would never exist without the decisions of people interacting with the system as a whole. People need to choose to visit a website and link to it, just as they need to choose to visit a particular section of the city. The major portals, that link to a few experts, and that everyone else links to and reads, serve as the “neighborhoods” of the web, and their emergence follows the same mechanisms as the emergence of shopping districts where all the goldsmiths are on the same block.