Apostrophe S

Gosh, has it really been a month since I’ve posted? Have I really only read 4 books so far this year? I guess I’ve been a rather bad blogger as of late, and a rather bad communicator in general. I’ve been working a lot. Couple of 50+ hour weeks. Nothing too dramatic. We’re in the middle of a system upgrade which I’m heavily involved in implementing, so I’m being pulled in a lot of directions at once. Anyway, boring, right? On to the book:

I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this book. It’s frustrating on a couple of levels. Mainly, I’m interested in the subject of emergent behavior and bottom-up methods of problem solving. And Johnson isn’t a boring writer. On the contrary, he keeps his points simple and transitions from one thought to another with relative ease. I suppose maybe my brain was easily saturated by all the technobabble, most of which I understood but was still bored by. I suppose my one criticism of the book would be Johnson’s practically evangelistic support of emergent programming. I mean, I can see where using swarm logic to solve the problem of the shortest distance between two points makes sense. But one point that Johnson failed to mention is that self-organizing systems are massively inefficient. They require enormous amounts of computing power and memory, not to mention the prep work involved in setting up the rules of the systems. Plus, once you’ve established the rules and pushed all the agents into action, there is no predicting when — or if — the system will ever produce a viable result. Instead of spending that much time and energy creating and executing a program that will solve a problem, why not just solve the problem yourself?

Also, since the book was originally published in 2001, many of the cutting-edge references and short-term predictions are a tad dated. I mean, “The Sims Online” was moderately successful, but it has fallen short of redefining gaming as we know it. In addition, Will Wright has moved on to developing “Spore” anyway.

Johnson’s interpretation of the 21st century Web culture is spot on. Few people have such a grasp on the Internet’s influence on culture and society as he does. That being said, I sometimes found myself wishing that his book would read more like an anthropological study and less like a press release trying to sell me a piece of software.

Also, I’ve already had several conversations with people on how the queen ant isn’t really a monarch at all. That tidbit alone (albeit not exactly an original Johnson idea) was worth the price of the book.