"Ant Queen Reading"

      Throughout the essay The Myth if the Ant Queen, Steven Johnson uses many metaphors to describe and create analogies between different self-organizing systems. The first example is that of an ant colony, where there is no single ant or group of ants controls which ant does which job or where trash and the dead are moved to. Instead, the ants decide as a whole through many individual choices that are all apparently unconnected with each other how to best go about their jobs through the usage of pheromones to communicate. His next example is that of the evolution of England`s Manchester, a city roughly 150 miles northwest of London (195, Johnson) and how the city changed as it grew, lower, middle, and upper class members all lived in their own sections of the city, without needing to see the other sections very often, if at all. In this way, different sections of the city emerged from the chaos, as if on their own. Interestingly enough, the definition and use of the word 'emergent' changes through the duration of the essay.

     In a scientific field, the word emergent means how unrelated properties or abilities become into being from the use and specific organization of an organism`s or system`s parts. For example, the parts of a bicycle all keep their properties (i.e. the wheels are round, frame triangular-ish, two handle bars, etc.) when separate or joined together, however, when joined together in a specific way, the result is a machine that will propel a rider forward by turning the pedals, which none of the parts by themselves are capable of doing. Initially used to describe the colonies of Harvester ants his college works with (where the ants would be parts of a system, collectively making a colony (the system) as a whole) fits in with the traditional definition and usage of the word 'emergent' from a scientific point of view (194, Johnson). However, by the middle of the essay, Johnson begins using the word in a different way, to describe how Manchester city created its own districts, keeping the classes within the city separate (198, Johnson). As Johnson writes, "The city [Manchester] has built a cordon sanitaire to separate the industrialists from the squalor they have unleashed on the world, concealing the demoralization of Manchester`s working-class districts - and yet that... comes... without "conscious, explicit intention... That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior" (198, Johnson). In this quote, the author explains what a quote from Friedrich Engels is saying, and changes his definition and usage of the word 'emergent'. From this point on in the essay, emergent is taken to mean a semblance of order arising from the midst of chaos, as opposed to unforeseeable properties or abilities coming into being from the combination of a system`s parts. In this way, the author can now use emergent to describe a self-organizing system like Manchester, where no order was strived for, and yet was created, unlike an ant colony where order is necessary for life and part of the overall goal of each individual ant in the colony.

     By keeping the wording the same but changing the definition of the words slightly, Johnson helps the reader to connect different parts of the essay together, also allowing for a somewhat easier analysis of the essay as a whole, but still being able to break the work into parts to analyze individually. For example, there are many parallels between the self-organization of Manchester as a city and the Harvest ants as a colony, albeit with several stark differences, the chief one being that the ants all have one single goal to achieve together (the working of the colony), to which organization is very important, while in Manchester the only common goal between all the citizens is to survive individually. Additionally, all activities the ants take are to help the colony and protect and care for their queen, while the tasks taken by Manchester residents are much less connected and often uncoordinated or connected at all. Despite these stark differences between the two communities, by using similar wording to describe them, Johnson paints a picture in the reader`s mind that the two are as similar as a community of people and ants can be from his perspective, despite several differences between the two.

     Looking at "The Myth of the Ant Queen" and the essay "Project Classroom Makeover" by Cathy Davidson, there are several connections between the two texts when viewed from this angle. One I can think of is that all the apps created by the iPod given to students at Duke University and creative uses found for the iPods are all emergent properties of the system created between the students together with their professors and their iPods. In this way, the characteristics of the ant colonies having no leaders but still being a highly functional team and apps students invented during that experiment are parallels in that neither were foreseeable outcomes of their respective systems. However, neither essay tackles a similar problem. In Johnson`s, he studies how self-organizing communities mange to appear and organize themselves without leaders while drawing several parallels with different types of self-organizing systems, while in the iPod experiment, an R&D worker gives college students free electronic gadgets to see what they are able to do with them, not a self-organizing system at all as humans naturally try to be leaders or give the mantle of command to someone less, and none of the projects would have had everyone involved as true, 100% equals because of human nature. Both texts look at different problems with different perspectives (Johnson`s essay being about self-organizing systems and Davidson`s about an experiment with students, learning and technology) but still manage to share certain parallels with each other, interestingly enough.