Johnson Reading Assignment

Much of Johnson’s “The Myth of the Ant Queen” focuses on complexity, but it is his use the word itself that helps to bring unity to an essay which seems to go in many directions. After beginning to tell the story of the history of Manchester, Johnson introduces the word complexity by explaining its meanings. He first provides what he considers “the more conventional sense of complexity as sensory overload… leading the way for a complementary series of aesthetic values.” (198) In the same way that this definition of complexity is what people will think of first, it is what the city of Manchester will appear as initially. Manchester looks like a rather chaotic city which inevitably comes with some aesthetic values. Johnson goes on to state, “There is also the sense of complexity as a self-organizing system—more Santa Fe Institute than Frankfurt School.” (199) He makes the case that this form of complexity is what Manchester really is. The Santa Fe institute is dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems while the Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy. In other words, complexity can describe a complicated system rather than something more basic. 

Johnson goes on to explain the history of the complexity theory, in a section of his essay that seems radically out of place until he relates in back to complexity. He provides a lengthy, difficult to follow story about Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. In it, he explains their work with patterns and how it led Shannon to write a book entitled The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Johnson writes, “In many respects, it deserves to be thought of as the founding text of complexity theory—the point at which the study of complex systems began to think of itself as a unified field.” (203) Being that much of the studying that went into this book was based on patterns, this claim provides a slightly alternative definition of complexity as a product of many patterns. This makes complexity sound much more organized, as opposed to disorganized, reiterating the second definition from above. Additionally, it helps to bring Johnson’s entire essay full circle. Early in the text, Johnson tells the story of how ants live. He explains how an ant farm is actually a very strategic and intelligent system. After Johnson explains so much regarding the word complexity, a unity can be drawn between his story of the city of Manchester and the way that ants live. Both civilizations operate under a complexity that appears overwhelming and chaotic but is actually rather systematic and full of patterns. 

Despite the obvious differences in subject matter, Cathy Davidson’s Project Classroom Makeover follows a structure much like Johnson does. Similarly to how Johnson speaks of complexity, Davidson discusses the term crowdsourcing in her work. In this, she takes a term that the audience may be familiar with and introduces it as if it was something brand new. In Davidson’s case, she discusses the education system rather than civilizations, but both authors make the argument that things are not what they first appear to be through the use of their respective key terms. Johnson makes the case that some civilizations are products of organized complexity despite appearing to be very disorganized. Davidson claims that the education system may benefit from a crowdsourcing model as opposed to the hierarchical model. While neither author states that one should be primary to the other, both argue that both forms need to be considered. As a result, these two works dealing with very unrelated topics go about their points in a very similar manner.