Learning with the Fang

Stigmergy is a class of behaviour in which collective activity is coordinated through the individuals’ response to and modification of their local environment—one agent’s modification becomes another’s cue .

Just over three years ago I decided to leave a very comfortable 25year career in ICT to embark on an experiment in self directed learning, toward the new frontiers of biotech, nanotech and materials science. Next week, I hope to start work in a significant new role that promises to open the door to all three. The only visible navigation point on my compass has been the phrase uttered by my good buddy Daniel McPherson early in 2005 ‘You need to understand podcasts, which are related to blogs via RSS – you will know when you know Obi-wan’.

Maybe I’m being over nostalgic because this time of year is the anniversary of my nasty accident, the start of my new ‘career’(s), that pesky daylight savings issue Daniel and I pioneered some research into in our days at Microsoft. or.. Maybe I’ve just found a label (thanks Gerry) for the final piece of the puzzle that helps me understand the strong feelings of ‘intuition’ encountered while meandering around the read/write web with my podcasts, blogs, tweets and other goodies from the ‘Web2.0’ lexicon.

See if you can see any patterns in this bunch of phrases:

[Random snippets taken deliberately out of context from a bunch of papers found via scientificcommons.org – in an attempt to create an arial perspective]
Special mention - this paper

• network effects, abundance …
• stigmergy, ephemeralization
• in ephemeralization things that used to be scarce become abundant
• agents, artefacts, environment/medium, shared activity
• hebbian reinforcement
• apoptosis or cell suicide
• foraging theory (there’s some lovely filth down here)
• swarm-intelligent robotics, biological inspirations of swarm intelligence
• This global connectivity increases the interactions between agents
• The Internet is a near ideal medium for stigmergic interaction
• Self organization – the coordinated movements in a school of fish, chevron-shaped flight formation of geese to cohesive movements in aggregation of slime mould
• no direct communication between individuals - we `communicate’ indirectly, via the environment (twitter)
• Ant teamwork suggests models for computing faster and organizing better
• real time visualisations of mass collaborative activities
• cooperative foraging through mass recruitment

Need to tidy up the ideas in this CONCLUSION.
To me, being able to (leave tracks) ‘write’ on the (medium) internet with almost zero friction is the most profound piece of the ‘platform’. It’s like we are all writing tiny bits of the world’s knowledge and information on scraps of paper and throwing them on the floor – the messier the better – like a haystack. The connections I make with other people via RSS is equivalent to the synaptic networks in my (our Global?) brain – making millions of quirky magnets that pull ‘needles’ from the haystack (of tiny pieces of paper).

CONCLUSION (V2.0)

So, I have discovered a word (stigmergy) that has helped me find a bunch of research into the similarities between the experiences I have had on the ‘Read/Write Web’ and other interesting phenomena – ant behaviour, swarm intelligence, neural networks, cell dynamics, post scarcity economics and self organization. Response to and organization of the environment is key to the concept of stigmergy – being able to modify (write to) the internet is the new big deal underpinning ‘Web2.0’.

The tracks we leave on the internet with our seemingly random acts of blogging, RSS subscription, podcasting, flickr uploads, twitter tweets etc are remarkably similar to the pheromone trails laid down by wandering ants, the tracks in wild grass that grew into pathways and eventually roadways or the staggering array of neural connections in our brains that strengthen, weaken, form and decay over time.

By examining conditions for ephemeralization we can see friction reduce toward ‘tipping points’ or inversions that we can only understand by adopting radically different thought patterns or frameworks of understanding. For example the impact of the open source movement on software development, the post scarcity abundance of online media distribution and the approaching digital education revolution (and I don’t mean Aussie politicians handing out $ for laptops).

Fang - Mike Seyfang