Comments on: The Mechanisms of Online Emergence

By: Free Games

Free Games — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:02:57 +0000

Interesting.. It gives me a different perspectives of backlinking. Thanks.

By: Christian Stewardship

Christian Stewardship — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:39:28 +0000

Perhaps the Intranet could even become a point of pride among employees, or an important part of the identity of the company…..

By: Best SEO Package

Best SEO Package — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:20:05 +0000

I had a good time reading your blog..
Thanks for sharing your thoughts in this blog..

By: I Know It When I See It : Andrew McAfee’s Blog

I Know It When I See It : Andrew McAfee’s Blog — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:31:15 +0000

[...] wrote about the mechanisms of online emergence here and here; they include linking, tagging, friending (as on Facebook and LinkedIn), and following (as [...]

By: Robert Weetman

Robert Weetman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:53:47 +0000

I’m not sure that when we speak of emergence in this way we’re being as accurate as we should be. Clearly some of the emergent properties of a system – as you describe – depend on having millions of people involved. But to conclude from this that emergence only appears with millions of people is I think a mistake. I see emergent properties in much smaller groups – perhaps only of three people for instance. Not the same properties which you are describing, but properties which are best described as ‘emergent’ none the less. For instance, putting three shy people in a room together doesn’t necessarily give you a shy group – but perhaps a confident one. The individual people remain shy. The group – when looked at as a group – may be comparatively confident. Three confident people in a room together don’t necessarily create a confident group – but perhaps a shy one (when you look at the group level).

By: Dave Kresta

Dave Kresta — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:37:59 +0000

I’m not sure I agree that Digg and Google Co-op rely on altruism. Another seemingly altruistic set of behaviors is associated with Wikipedia contributors. I believe that ultimately all such types of “altruistic behaviors” are not strictly altruistic since the contributors do eventually receive value out of the systems they contribute to. Perhaps a better designation is that of a “gift economy” (as opposed to a competition economy). In a gift economy, participants contribute first to the community, and only later receive value from the community benefits. Such a gift economy is only one of several characteristics of systems that exhibit collective intelligence, a concept that is slightly broader than emergence. See http://www.collaborativeye.com/collaboration_journal/characteristics-of-collective-intelligence-designing-a-cultu.html
for more discussion on this.

By: Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee — Fri, 19 May 2006 20:43:00 +0000

Nick, excellent point. It gets to an important question that I don’t know the answer to at this point: how many agents/contributors and how many interactions are required for emergence? In other words, are 50 hardcore taggers ‘enough?’ 500 casual ones?
My intuition tells me that the minimum efficient scale for emergence is actually pretty low, especially since interactions are globally visible. But I don’t know this for a fact.
It strikes me as the kind of thing that might be pretty straightforward to model mathematically, but since I’m not a modeller I don’t know how to go about it. Suggestions, anyone?

By: Nick Carr

Nick Carr — Fri, 19 May 2006 13:34:43 +0000

Andrew,

Interesting post. I have one question. You write, “This implies that companies’ Intranets might be able to take faster and deeper advantage of all the mechanisms of online emergence than the broad public Internet.” I can see how that statement, in the context of your argument, would apply to altruistic mechanisms (things we do to benefit others), but I’m not sure I see how it would apply to nonaltruistic mechanisms (things we do out of self-interest). You point out how important the massive scale of the internet is to its emergent structure. Corporate intranets obviously have much less scale, which would imply that valuable structure would emerge much more slowly (if at all). As you note at the start of the post intranets are “infinitesimally small compared to the Internet.” Won’t this fact always make them less amenable to the automatic or organic development of valuable structure?

Thanks.

Nick