Emergent democracy
Emergent democracy is a term coined by Ross Mayfield during a discussion kicked off by Joichi Ito to address the democratic potential of weblog conversations.
Emergence is a term relevant to the study of complex systems. Emergence is what you have when the relatively simple interactions of relatively simple parts of a system yield complex results over time. Emergent behaviors are behaviors that are not directed by systems of command and control, but emerge from subtle, complex interactions. Common examples are flocks of ducks or birds that act in concert but with no specific leader, or colonies of ants that establish routes for collecting food based on group experience reinforced by pheromones.
Ito and others saw the potential for political movement to emerge from weblogs. The weblog was originally conceived as a form of personal publishing to the web, but given the interactive nature of the Internet, weblog conversations and communities began to form, as well as tools for adding comments to weblog items, and for linking items about the same subjects. Meta tools appeared for analysis of subjects addressed by weblogs (e.g. , , ), and these tools showed the potential for blog community interactions to have political force and real impact. The classic case was the significant response by bloggers when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency, though conventional journalists had ignored the comment. The story escalated to influential bloggers and there was a real impact at the political level, leading to Lott's resignation as majority leader. There was no directed movement to respond to Lott's comments; the response was emergent.
Ito organized a group effort to discuss and document the emergent democracy concept. He announced meetings on his weblog, inviting any of his readers to attend a conference call that was augmented by IRC chat for posting realtime visual cues and backchannel conversation, and a wiki for gathering notes from the call. This "multimodal" approach was called a "happening" . The conversation resulted in an Emergent Democracy paper that generated many discussions about the potential for weblogs and other social software tools to have an impact on participation in governance. termite mounds emerge naturally from termites dropping the next grain of sand near where they stumbled onto a grain of sand on the ground.
- "Human governing behaviors at the level of complexity required to implement systems like coalitions and policies and constitutions don't happen automatically. People make them happen.
- "Networking tools and technologies can lower the activation threshold for starting groups, taking action, and combining into larger groups of influence.
- "Emergent Democracy won't happen unless we -- the nodes in the network -- take deliberate steps to organize and make it happen."
See also
