A note by Elia Diodati on Dharmendra Yadav's proposal to form a self-regulating Blogger Association briefly discussed emergent phenomena, as below.
"... the term "Singapore blogosphere" at best describes the transient, nebulous association of cross-referenced, internetworked blogs that nominally claim some affiliation with Singapore; like all emergent phenomena [#3 in original article], there is an inalienable quality of intangibility and ineffability to the very concept of a blogosphere." [emphases mine]
One may say that this is nearly religious in nature; equally it could have been asserted that the blogosphere is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", but that was not Elia Diodati's meaning. Intangible, ineffable - these are words that bound and enclose in .5pt border the fairy-wisp idea of utter indescribability, and that poorly sing the praises of the extraordinary stability of emergent systems. Elia's cited reference #3 gives a much better picture of emergent systems:
"... orders arises from elements within a system acting independently from one another within a framework of procedural rules or laws that generate positive and negative feedback such that independent behavior takes the actions of others into consideration without intending to do so, and that the impact of that behavior tends to facilitate more complex relationships of mutual assistance than could ever be deliberately created. Such systems generate order "spontaneously." In doing so they can act in unanticipated ways because there is no overarching goal, authority, or blueprint that orders the actions of their components or the responses they make to feedback generated within the system." [emphases mine]
Emergence is the opposite extreme of reductionism; emergent properties are what disappear when things are broken down to their component parts for study. The stability of emergent systems can be observed and verified by small testing perturbations. Such systems can have negative feedback models within, or both negative and positive feedback models within. (A Watt steam governor is an example of a negative feedback model.)
Returning to the self-regulation of the Singaporean blogosphere, Mr Yadav's original proposal of "procedural rules or laws" suggested centralized regulation by bloggers among bloggers, and both Elia Diodati and Bernard Leong have argued that this type of rules breaks down the blogosphere into scrutinizing its component blog posts one by one, therefore constraining the natural "vibrant, organic realm of discourse" and inherent positive/negative feedbacks in the blogosphere. It should be noted that emergence arises from independent factors interacting with each other in positive and negative feedbacks. Small perturbations within the emergent system will self-correct through such feedbacks; bloggers criticize, deterrently ignore, and encourage one another to share views in civil and rational discourse. To over-protect bloggers from the large ocean of opinions is, in my view, destructive to the community, and I leave it to the reader to decide if the proposed centralized regulation is good.
2 comments:
The existence of the blogosphere is ethereal if one adopts the traditional reductionist viewpoint and try to distill a notion of what it is from axoimatic grounds. Thus I stand by my original description of the blogosphere as intangible and ineffable. Please also note that the description was placed in a context where it was contrasted against an ingrained notion that the blogosphere is some coherent entity that can be addressed and talked to with one voice. It is clearly not so, and trying to hunt down "what" the blogosphere is is as futile as trying to walk on a cloud.
Yes. Point taken, as how it was also taken earlier when I read your Sg Angle article :) This post is not intended to criticize your choice of words, but to emphasize the other aspect (emergence) which you'd very briefly mentioned in the article. As the mention was very brief, the intrinsic stability of emergent systems was something that I expanded on. My apologies if you perceived my style of writing as a criticism.
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