I had the pleasure of watching this TED talk by Ant biologist Deborah M. Gordon who has spent decades digging in the Arizona desert to decipher the chemical, genetic and behavioral codes of ant colonies.
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What’s interesting here is that there are only a few rules which define behaviour for the whole colony, and those rules allow the colony to change behaviour as it grows, without requiring new rules. The natural feedback loop here is the number of each type of Ant returning to the colony.
Order can appear (well synchronicity anyway) in systems that don’t have rules per se too, The Millenium bridge in London had to be closed soon after opening as the bridge and the people crossing it fell into a natural synchronous pattern that caused the bridge to sway, and the sway caused people to line up their walking frequency with the frequency of the sway making it worse.
The point here is that natural feedback into a group can cause the group to exhibit common behaviour.
On the web the rules of interaction are still not clear, but it’s likely that there won’t be many of them when they are clear. Perhaps, when they are clear they define the Societal Web, and I think a pre-requisite is that understanding of content through the semantic web needs ot be refined, and authoritative searching will also become a norm. These technologies are only now beginning to be developed.
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