Emergence Chapter 4

• Pages 130-131, Johnson uses the Bill Clinton/Gennifer Flowers story as an example to set up his discussion on feedback
• Johnson talks about feeback loops and reverberating cycles and why they happen on page 134
• Page 137 shows the differences between positive and negative feedback
• Johnson talks about Mumford's critique of Jacobs and the idea of metropolitan centers having the ability to self regulate on page 146
• Page 149 talks about ECHO and Well, and how their communities were at small enough scales where self-regulation wasn't a concern for the software
• Page 152 and 153 introduce slashdot.org as a self organizing community

The class discussion opened with final thoughts from the previous class session. This tied in nicely to the introduction of chapter 4 that we talked about on Friday. The part about discussion that we spent a long time on was positive and negative feedback. This made more clear some examples of positive and negative feedback and how they are helpful for different situations. Negative feedback seems to take over from positive feedback after a while in some of the examples we went through. This was beneficial because it helped to think of some ways in society that this occurs, and where negative feedback is present in self organizing systems.

Johnson's Emergence Chapters 2-3

• Johnson talks about ants and the central intelligence of a colony with relation to swarm logic on page 74
• Gordons 5 fundamental principles of bottom up intelligence is on page 78
• On page 84 Johnson talks about how complex organisms come from simple beginnings
• Krugmans system is discussed with its 2 axioms and business example on page 90
• Johnsons talks about Jane Jacobs and the idea of sidewalks being important for flows of information in cities on page 94
• Johnson discusses cities and thier ability to store and retrieve information on page 100
• On page 104, Johnson talks about how cities are a pattern in time, which is like all emergent systems
• Page 108 is about clustering and how neighborhood systems function like a user interface
• New flows of energy cause new kinds of cities to develop, and this is on page 113
• Johnsons talks about how intelligence requires connectedness and organization on page 117
• Page 123 - 124 talks about Alexa, and how it has bidirectional linking which is different from the internet and its one directional linking
• On page 125 Johnson makes the claim that smart technology makes us dumber

The class discussion was helpful with talking about the idea of emergent systems with respect to the any colony. We talked about swarm logic to begin with, and asked the question as to how the entire organism was able to survive and grow with individual parts being short lived. In this case the individual parts were the ants, and the colony was the larger organism that evolved over time. This idea was unclear to me before we went into class. I understood what Johnson was saying, but I was having a hard time figuring out exactly how the system could grow with a completely new set of ants each year. I think we came to the conclusion that with the colony growing and living through the course of the queens life, it builds up information that helps it survive, and therefore doesn't necessarily need the same ants each year. It doesn't matter so much about the individual short lived parts, because the colony is also an organism that grows and evolves by itself.

Another thing in class that was helpful was the discussion about Alexa. We came to the conlusion that although Alexa and similar programs that have this bidirectional linking, they don't necessarily make the internet as a whole an emergent system. This showed that although on a smaller level a program can show emergence possibly by looking at user interaction and making connections, the internet is just too big and chaotic with too many websites and programs for it to be able to be considered an emergent system

Comedy Club

Last weekend I went home to South Milwaukee because my friend Ashley got like 15 $1 tickets to some comedy club called the Comedy Cafe. I wasn't sure what that meant with the prices, because someone said they were free, then it was one dollar, then it was one dollar and a two drink minimum ticket. It ended up being the last one, and was overall about 10 bucks only to go to the show. The only live comic I have ever seen was Lewis Black at Summerfest, and that was pretty funny, but I wasn't sure what to expect at a comedy club. We ended up having reserved seats or something on the inside, which was just 4 tables pushed together. The club was smaller than I thought it would be, and it seemed like there was maybe only between 100 and 150 people total.
The first comic out there was not very good. He would tell a joke, and then look around the room and count out how many people were laughing. I think he thought it was funny, but it was just sort of awkward. And Eric Friske (from class) said the comedian kept looking at him to see if he was laughing, and made him feel pretty uncomfortable. He was only out there for like 10 minutes though, so that wasn't too bad. The second guy out was much better. He was a big guy from the west named Bob Bledsoe. The 3rd guy out was the main act, and I had never heard the name before (it was Kyle Cease), but as soon as I saw him I recognized him from a couple movies he had small parts in. He Bogie Lowenstein, the guy who threw the house party in 10 Things I hate About You, and the slow clapper in Not Another Teen Movie. From those movies I thought he would be nerdy, or dorky or whatever, just from the characters he played, but he ended up being really funny to the point where I was laughing/crying from laughing too hard for most of the show. That's it, that was my first time at a comedy club, and it ended up being well worth it.

Auge in Translation

From Auge page 103: "The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude."

This is much like the way the characters in Lost in Translation seemed to feel when they were separated from each other. In an area where they knew no one else or had no one else to really communicate with, their hotel rooms became non-places. While spending time in the hotel rooms the audience gets to witness first hand how a space made into a non-place emphasizes the solitude that the characters felt.

I just realized nothing exciting or interesting at all has happened to me recently. This makes it hard to blog about whatever. The most exciting thing to happen to me was on Tuesday night I realized that there would be no way I could graduate next semester by looking at my DARS report.

Basically I needed 3 more credits in one category, and none of the classes required were offered next semester or in the summer. This was just terrible because the day had been going so well, Guitar Hero 2 came out, the new Foo Fighters live CD came out, which I didn't buy, but still it did come out so that's exciting, and then all that happiness I felt quickly went away because I overlooked some things on my DARS last semester. I was a little edgy Wednesday and Thursday morning, but then after talking to some guy today I found out that there can be an exception made and I can take a different class instead and still graduate, and I also found out I can double up on majors now. So no matter what happens, don't worry, everything always works itself out in the end.

This was pretty short, so I'll leave with an inspirational quote:
"Abe Lincoln once said, 'If you are a racist, I will attack you with the north.'"
- Michael Scott

Bball/reverse

Trying out some new video editing stuff

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Notes

• On page 1 Jameson introduces many artists and musicians that contribute to postmodernism.
• Page 2 has Jameson talking about postmodernism in architecture and states that it is a kind of aesthetic populism.
• Jameson talks about postmodernism in culture as being associated with a political stance on multinational capitalism on page 3.
• Jameson brings up the importance to think about postmodernism not as a style but instead as a cultural dominant that allows coexistence on page 4.
• On page 5 Jameson says that thet more powerful the vision of something logical the more powerless the reader starts to feel.
• Jameson analyzes Van Gogh and a Utopian outlook on page 7.
• On page 8 Van Gogh is compared to Andy Warhol.
• Page 9 is where Jameson talks about Warhol and new postmodernism represented by flatness or depthlessness.
• Jameson talks about how in postmodernism depth is replaced by surface or multiple surfaces on page 12.
• Jameson talks about how fragmentation replaces alienation in postmodernism with the shift in cultural dynamics of pathology on page 14.
• On page 16 Jameson describes how our psychic experiences today are dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, which differs from modernism.

I wasn't able to draw a very distinct line on modernism to postmodernism after the reading, although I didn't really spend a lot of time trying to do so. Class was helpful because we ended up making categories on the chalkboard with aspects of both postmodernism and modernism and how they differed with each other based on what Jameson discussed in the reading. We learned that there was a high end of modernism which was characterized by Van Gosh, and compared that to postmodernism which was characterized in Jameson by Andy Warhol. Modernism was then described to be about detail, depth and richness, to be significant to social aspects of the time, having importance in content and meaning, and to be very contextualized. Postmodernism was thought to be more abstract, flat and containing depthlessness, to be more of a commodity, more about form and style, and to be very decontextualized. This drawing on the differences was beneficial because I wasn't so sure how the paintings Jameson showed from Van Gogh and Warhol were that much different of each other, but then after drawing this list it was easy to see all of these differences portrayed in just two paintings.