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.