Mark Bold

Pop science publishing relies on metaphors and often inadequate conceptual comparisons to make ideas from academic and scientific activity easier to understand for the mass market. Converting hard data and theory, analysis and documentation from universities and laboratories into a paperback format involves massive simplification, a disregard for accuracy, and a bubbling mix of metaphorical allusions. Richard Dawkins’ blind watchmaker and Susan Blackmore’s meme machine spring to mind, without even attempting to enter into the always farcical world-views of full time social scientists. But the technique has reached its limit with Steven Johnson’s Emergence, in which the reader is subjected to an onslaught of similes and inept conceptual mismatching until the argument of the book is completely unclear.

The book starts out with the intention of dealing with the concept of emergence, which is never really clearly defined, but can be thought of as intellectual moonshine brewed up with the leftovers of Durkheim’s biological analogy (’the sum is greater than the constituent parts’) and a smattering of anarchistic/laissez-faire ideals. Fundamentally, it is a belief in the power of self-organisation, and provides a useful alternative understanding of social formations to the ham-fisted ’structure-agency’ debate that preoccupies sociology university departments to the exclusion of the real world.

But instead of doing something interesting with this concept - investigating how social groups emerge from collections of individuals or life itself emerges from collections of cells, Johnson is more concerned to promote the work of pale computer geeks and ant farmers, often describing irrelevant ideas with confusing detail before summing up with a pean to the ‘power of emergence’ that appears from nowhere at the end of a paragraph. Johnson’s belief in the power of self-organisation seems also to apply to his writing style, in which meaning is intended to emerge from the chaos of his anecdotes.

We are given a short introduction to the concept of emergence early in the book: ‘the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication’. The low-level rules are the simple instructions followed by component parts of a system - from ants or cells to, perhaps, people within a society. Through the operation of simple rules, and possibly feedback from consequences that changes behaviour, by thousands or millions of individuals in a seemingly complex system, an order and apparent structure emerges. In its awareness of trends emerging from complexity and the relationship between different levels of reality, it provides a subtle and illuminating perspective that is far removed from the brittle world of all sociological ideas.

However, never wasting an opportunity to throw in a clumsy comparison, Johnson chooses to illustrate his attempted definition of emergence with an awkward metaphor involving an infinite number of mechanical billiards tables that would be entirely surreal if it was not so confusing. All the way through the rest of the book, we are treated to the seemingly arbitrary nature of his metaphorical allusions.

He starts off with a description of the workings of an ant colony, apparently with the aim of understanding human society better, although ants seem to be the key to an understanding of emergence, as they so dramatically show how insignificant individual components can organise to to perform on a larger scale - in this case the colony. But then this is applied to the formation of city districts and computer networks and even the human brain, and the misuse of metaphor begins to weaken the primary idea.

Johnson’s preoccupation with the internet takes up the core of the book, and some of the descriptions of how particular websites and message boards moderate content seem to go on forever. Will the network develop into a global brain and attain self-awareness? He draws on neuroscience, but by now, there are so many metaphorical allusions clashing in the text that you begin to feel that anything might happen, and that you are reading a work of fiction with a very roundabout narrative.

In fact, as the confusion increases, he changes tactic to become a futurologist, and conjures up a terrifying dystopia, via a childishly naive view of the media world and practical applications of emergence, where media outlets actually know what we want, and all cultural commodities (one presumes he means only those of American corporations) are instantly available, meaning there is no longer any need to do anything and we just watch a TV that knows what we want to watch. All the time, he interprets emergence as things spontaneously appearing - for example, the Internet appeared because of the number of computers communicating with each other - there is no mention of the American military project that the network is actually developed from.

The concept of emergence is of immense value in understanding complex systems and the different scales of interaction and meaning there are in the world. But although occasionally interesting, Johnson’s book does not go very far in expanding on the framework of emergence, and indeed, roams so far from the central idea that any real understanding is obscured.

JOHNSON, Steven (2002) Emergence. London: Penguin