Johnson Reading Assignment

       A key term that appeared throughout Johnson's text was "self-organizing system." The development of this term started with Johnson's analysis of Gordon's ant colonies. "Gordon's work focuses on the connection between the microbehavior of individual ants ant the overall behavior of the colonies themselves. . . they scour the desert floor for food, competing with other colonies for territory, and - once a year - mating with them. She is a student, in other words, of a particular kind of emergent, self-organizing system" (Johnson 193). The "myth of the ant queen" is that there really is no ant queen; the ants instinctively know what to do. The queen is not the ruler of the ants, but rather the ants just know that she is the one who lays the eggs and that they must take care of her. The ants know how to organize themselves to get the necessary jobs done, hence the term self-organizing system.

       Following his analyzation of the ant colonies, Johnson moved on to the development of the city of Manchester. Much like ant colonies, humans gravitate towards the group and follow the majority. The population of Manchester exploded, and thousands of people flooded in during the Industrial Revolution. Being in Manchester triggered a sensory overload. "The noise and the senselessness somehow transformed into an aesthetic experience. . . But complexity is not solely a matter of sensory overload. there is also the sense of complexity as a self-organizing system. . . This sort of complexity lives up one level: it describes the system of the city itself. . . the city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions" (Johnson 199). Manchester is a self-organizing system because it had no government, only millions of ideas and decisions coming together to create the city it became. There were no rulers or police, yet they were still able to create a working city. Admittedly, Manchester, according to Johnson, was "noisy, polluted, massively overcrowded," but it was a system nonetheless. Out of all the chaos of the self-organization, the people of Manchester were still able to create a civilization that attracted countless intellectuals and public figures.

       Johnson then went on to discuss meetings between scholars. These meetings were also somewhat of a self-organizing system, as they had no leader telling them to meet. They simply decided on their own the best course of action and met to work together. Out of these meetings came important developments, especially in the scientific community. "Five years after his interactions with Turing, Shannon published a long essay. . . Dense with equations and arcane chapter titles such as 'Discrete Noiseless Systems,' the book managed to become something of a cult classic, and the discipline it spawned - information theory - had a profound impact on the scientific and technological research that followed" (Johnson 202). The book was created as a product of a self-organizing system, and subsequent works based off theories in the book appeared. The self-organizing system continued. People, not under the direction of a leader, came together and worked to create a string of works and discoveries.

       The term "self-organizing system" tied together the different sections of Johnson's work because it gave them all a common focus. The city of Manchester and the scholars could be tied back to the ants. The city of Manchester was like the ant colony because humans just grouped together and instinctively created what they believed a city should be, and the scholars came together without being instructed to do so to make discoveries that bettered the "colony" of humankind.