REVIEW DAY: First, a web site review. A few days ago, I said that people in modern day America often have interesting and unexpected mixtures of tastes and interests. Eclectic times, these are. When you look at a personal web site, including my own, you often see this. The home page has all kinds of buttons and links about all kinds of topics that hardly have anything in common . . . except that the owner of the site likes all of them.

Here’s a good case in point. The site belongs to a fellow named Ron Turner. It’s at www.connect.net/ron. It’s a nice enough site, tastefully done. But Ron’s topics are truly an eclectic blend. They include: philosophy; the X-Files; Gershwin; Allen Ginsberg; jazz music from the 1930s; the Dallas Mavericks; Ansel Adams; Gino Vanelli; the Bossa Nova; Les Paul guitars; and other curious and sundry things.

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things …” And that’s indeed what Ron and a whole lot of other personal web site people do. And the world is a more interesting place for it!

Next, a book review. The book of the day is Steven Johnson’s “Emergence”. I give it a moderate thumbs down. Johnson is undoubtedly a smart dude and a hip writer, and he says a lot of interesting things about the “the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software”. But he doesn’t really do much to forward your understanding of the overall “complexity” movement in science and computing. For that, you still need one of the basic texts, like Waldrop’s “Complexity” or Holland’s “Hidden Order”. I got to the last chapter of Emergence wondering when the insights were going to start flowing. Unfortunately, they never did.

Oh, Johnson proffers a lot of observations which seem at first like insight. But as with night mushrooms, they wither in the mid-day sun. His biggest topic of interest regards self-organization and the Internet. He admits that it’s hard for the average person to see any trends towards a more organic functionality emerging on the web, but for an out-there guy like him, the new day is coming into view. The book was written in 2001, and cites a number of web sites and site networking mechanisms (like Alexa) as heralds of the “within five years” future. Unfortunately, more than three of those five years have passed, and the great web emergence and convergence that Johnson prophesied seems nowhere in sight (or site!).

For example, Johnson cites the rating system on www.slashdot.com (a commentary board on techie stuff), which allows viewers to vote on the quality of each posting and to filter out materials that get low average ratings. I checked out slashdot recently and the voting and filtering system was still there, although you had to search hard for the buttons that allowed you to use it. I decided not to filter anything; I thus reviewed posts with ratings that ranged from –1 (very poor) to + 5 (very good). To be honest, some of the most interesting stuff got ratings of 1 or 2, and the stuff that came in at 4 or 5 was often quite bland. Perhaps user feedback is also a recipe for mediocrity. You almost feel embarrassed reading Johnson’s predictions, as though you were watching an apocalyptic preacher yelling about the coming of the end of the world, telling you that he sees the fire on high and hears the approaching tidal waves, that the moment is about to arrive, so stand up and be ready for the rapture … and nothing happens. The birds just go on singing.

Johnson makes some interesting points about feedback and how it helps foster (or prevent) the self-organization mechanisms that allow independent geese to fly in V patterns and leaderless ants to maintain a colony and hapless car drivers to contribute to a traffic jam (and also how “districts” emerge in cities without planning, e.g. the restaurant district or the diamond district or the used machinery district – I recall walking down some street in lower Manhattan and being amazed at all the old drill presses in the windows). His example of how press stories like Bill Clinton’s dabblings with Gennifer Flowers (if you recall the pre-Monica era) now emerge beyond the control of big media bosses is certainly useful. But overall, his book is a quick and pleasant read that seems substantial but ultimately leaves you hungry – as though you had just eaten out in that classic example of urban emergence, Chinatown.