Response to Johnson posts

Hello class, and thanks again for your latest round of blog posts. Many of you have done a much better job of including quotations (and analysis of them) to back up your points. Keep it up! Once again, many of your points could be made even more convincing by the citation of a particular example. In some cases, for instance, students said that the way Johnson used a term like “emergence” or “complexity” changed, but didn’t cite representative examples to illustrate the differences from different parts of the essay. This brings me to my next point: connections. You all did an excellent job of making connections within Johnson’s text and, in many cases, between Johnson’s text and Davidson’s. For example, Hilary brings up Davidson to discuss Johnson’s interest in “peer networks,” since it suggests that both are interested in democratic systems. (I would like to hear more about the political aspects of his “progressive” peer networks, although this is tricky since it’s not addressed in the article). The next skill to focus on (particularly in your papers!) will be to qualify these connections, or in other words, to draw distinctions within the broader connections you’re making. That is, it’s not just important to notice that the two texts are doing similar things, it’s also important to think about the limits of that similarity, because oftentimes the differences within them lead you to a significant insight. For example, Xiaofan begins to explain why self-correcting computer programs are a problematic example of self-organizing systems because they require a master to implement them—she’s working through the limits of the connections that Johnson makes. I would like her to offer some quotations to close read, however. Continue to work through the logic of the connections you make as you begin work on your rough draft: where do distinctions emerge? Why might these distinctions be important? What do they tell us about the limitations of the concepts Davidson and Johnson are dealing with? I look forward to reading your drafts!