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Are We Ants? We Are Blogs!
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, January 06 @ 11:32:18 EST News
Perhaps I'm a bit late to this, but John Hiler of Microcontent News had an interesting series of short posts just before Christmas on decentralized, emergent systems. In particular, he notes that the blogosphere seems to resemble such a phenomena. His first post was a brief comment on a 1997 book, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) (Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams). The second was a deeper look at how blogs resemble ants hunting for food (Artificial Ants). The third brought the analogy to the Internet in general (The Network Is The Computer).

While I wouldn't push the analogy with ants too far, and I am not entirely convinced that the blogosphere is indeed an emergent system, I do believe that decentralized, emergent systems are fascinating to study and they will only become more prevalent as our world becomes increasingly networked. Entirely new and complex phenomena, behaviors and systems are being created not by conscious design necessarily, but by the interaction (i.e., networking) of many individual units following relatively simple rules.

 
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