For this work, I
decided to focus on the term “self-organizing systems.” I noticed that this
phrase appeared a number of times throughout Johnson’s work, and was a term
used to tie most of his examples together. By “self-organizing systems,” I
believe Johnson means a system or social process that evolves without the
direction of one entity or a number of entities. Some examples of this that
Johnson gives are the anecdote of the ant colony and the history of the city of
Manchester. With the ant colony, the ants naturally know where to put their
waste and dead fellow ants without the direction of lead of some head or “queen”
ant. Similarly, the ants know where to lead the queen ant when the colony is
threatened. They do this not because the queen ordered them to or because the
queen is their leader. They do so because they know the queen is needed for
them to reproduce. The city of Manchester, likewise, rose from a very small and
insignificant town to an industrial powerhouse without the direction of some
head figure. The city shaped itself over time, essentially organized itself.
A connection I
noticed between Davidson and Johnson’s works was that that Johnson’s work
presented, without ever mentioning, examples of Davidson’s idea of
crowdsourcing. Each of Johnson’s examples shows how success is achieved through
group or the collective of work of many individuals. Johnson does mention any
cases where one single “expert” or head figure creates something on their own.
Davidson could perhaps use Johnson’s examples to show how effective
crowdsourcing is in nature, thus helping further support her argument.
Thomas's emphasis of the way Johnson focuses on success through collaborative effort rather than by a single "expert" can be related to Lethem's idea that knowledge is a shared medium that cannot be copyrighted. Our thoughts are all "secondhand," derived from the ideas of others, and together we pool all of our knowledge to create something new. The concept that an idea can be thought up by a single person, or "expert," is flawed because our ideas are influenced by the works of others. Even unintentionally, we succeed through "the collective work of many individuals," as Thomas puts it. It is in this way that we can see collaboration between many people as an essential to innovation.
ReplyDeleteThomas's argument about how the idea of crowd sourcing is emphasized in Johnson's and Davidson's work, and how success "is achieved through group or the collective of work of many individuals" can be related to Lethems argument against trademarking/copyrighting/etc. In Lethems essay, he emphasizes how usemonopoly hurts the public domain, and by restricting people's right to build upon/improve/use other peoples "intellectual property" we are not letting that idea best affect society. This can relate to Davidson's argument against credentialing because by relying exclusively on "the experts" we are limiting ourselves to only a narrow view of an idea.
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