The Behavior Emerges

do social media, you do the stuff. Where do all the loll cats come from? Whom? Well, Joe? When when an internet and an Internet user love each other very much? Um, lol cats happens, happen apparently, so so whole letters of them. Yeah. Then we're using low cats as an example of something that that many people refer to as a meme. It's a kind of a very basic idea, a germ of an idea that can evolve and transform over time. It gets spread around kind of like uh, you know, really

bad flum in many ways. In fact, it's also very similar to the concept of going viral. To continue with the illness theme, but the idea of things things spreading across the internet. This is one example of something that we want to talk about today called emergence. Yeah. So if you look at an individual meme like a low cat, a low cat is part of what we might call a meme plex, which is a complex system that displays what we would term emergent behavior. Okay, so what exactly

is emergent behavior? Emergent behavior is a really interesting way of describing how complexity or rises in systems. Okay, okay, so think about it like this, Um, imagine a flock of birds. You've probably seen birds flocking before, like when they go into a big spiral, you know, and they're all moving and you see the cloud of birds undulating in the sky. So we're talking about like a flock

of sparrows as opposed to like the v formation of geese. Right, all right, how does that flock of birds decide how to move? That's an excellent question. Obviously they have a foreman r Right. You seem to think, well, maybe there's like one bird that moves first, and the other birds

follow that bird and the general bird. Yeah, the birds don't have a leader the way we would describe how these birds flock and create these beautiful complex patterns is the concept of emergence, and what that means is that it's a complex pattern that's unpredictable, that's created by individual agents following local rules. So the way birds create a flocking pattern like that is that each one individually has no idea that it's flocking, and it has no idea

of how to create a flock. It just knows that. Well when the person, when the bird flying next to me gets x number of inches close, I move in the other direction, and I follow the bird in front of me, and to say, if there is a predator approaching or some other stimulus, we shift in in this direction. And surprisingly enough, if you just get enough individuals acting

on those rules, these crazy patterns emerged. Right. So the same sort of thing is true in schools of fish exactly where you'll see an enormous school of fish all moving as if it's one body, and it's not that there is Just like with the birds, there's not a leader fish that every other fish is taking its cues off of. It's all behaving this this what if you were to boil it way down, if you were able to strip away the complexity, you would see that there

are these basic rules that underlie the system. It's just that when you get all those different individuals together and you have the actual environment playing a part, those those usually fairly simple rules lead to this huge amount of complexity. The other thing about how emergent systems behave um is that one tends to say that they're greater than the some of their parts. And what that means, like how I just affirmed, yeah, doctor, yeah, they're greater than the

some of their parts. So what that means is that if you have a bunch of birds, they're not following rules. Just like every bird move forward six inches, that would not be an emergent system. That would be a totally predictable system, right, And the movement of the birds would be something that we could understand is simple addition of all of the steps if if this than that. Right.

But the way birds actually flock is they interact with each other, and this creates massively unpredictable patterns unless you have like a very powerful computer model that is simulating each individual bird. Right. And we can see this not just in organic behavior. It comes up in all sorts of systems. That have uh, layers of complexity to them. Well, yeah, you might even say, so, how about a termite mound

or an ant hill. The mound itself is not living, but the mound is an example of emergence because no single termite knows how to create a mound. There's no leader termite telling the other termites what to do. They're all just following a rule like put a piece of dirt where something is wet or something like that. And then you end up with these eight foot tall monstrosities that look like something from a sci fi film and you look at and you think, man, that looks like

it was built by somebody. You know, it has this illusion of design. Humans can flock the same way. If you've ever been in a large crowd of people on a sidewalk and haven't you know, run smack into anyone unless you were looking at your smartphone. It's the same kind of behavior. And uh, and that is not the only way that humans use emergence, As it turns out,

What's what's all this stuff about thought? Thought processes? Oh yeah, well there are actually so and this is controversial, right, we don't know this, but there are plenty of people who are consciousness theorists who think that the very idea of human consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, meaning that so the brain is constructed of neurons, has lots of little neurons, and no single neuron knows how

to create a brain. What it is is that each one is following extremely simple local rules, but with enough interconnection and feedback and interactivity, they create this aminon that we would think of as a mind or consciousness. Interesting, so even emergent behavior on an individual basis, showing again that systems are When we talk about systems, we're not just talking about a collection of people or animals. We could be talking about a system as in and just

a single person. And it's funny to think about how there are levels of this. Right. So within a cell there is emergent behavior, right because it's individual proteins following simple rules of chemistry that interact together to form this mass pattern known as a cell. And then you group all those cells together, and if you buy into the emergence theory of consciousness, they can in a brain make consciousness.

And then you get enough people with consciousness together acting individually to follow local rules, and they can create mass patterns. Like One example I found that's interesting is um the idea of mosh pits as emergent behavior. You know, nobody he's controlling the mosh pit. They're just simple rules. I'm not kidding. How many mash bits you been in this week? Hey, buddy, I went to college in the nineties. Okay, I was no I was trying to get out of the pit. Oh,

I see, you're the whimp. I'm the guy. I'm the guy who I'm the guy who appreciated it when I didn't have an elbow thrust into my temple. Okay, so that's fair. That's a fair point, I think. But I'm also a guy who loves punk rock. You did head banger hair, didn't you? I did back then? Yeah? Yeah, Well, first of all, I had hair, and second of all it was headbanger hair. This is true, his headbanger hair and emergent behavior. I think it might be a meme.

I can tell you this. It's not emerging anymore. That ship has sailed. I'm getting back, getting back to actual, the actual discussion yet. So you might be wondering, how does this tie into what we were talking about, which was social media and part of that was the discussion about how is social media affecting us as society, how's it affecting us on individual basis? Is it actually rewiring us?

If you've listened to our previous podcast, you heard us talk all about that theory or that hypothesis I really should say, and that uh, and the disagreement that exists around that or at least around the the rigorous, rigorous scientific evidence that doesn't seem to be there for either side. At the moment um, we wanted to talk more about, well maybe all of that, Uh, all of those concerns

are ultimately moot. For one thing, this is the world we live in now, right, I mean that's It's not like I don't expect us to turn back from right right. We're never going to put down Facebook and say, yeah, I think we're bored of this now, no more of that. But but but something else, I think I think something else would come along to fill that void or to make a new you know, something that we can't even think of right now. But it would be the new

thing that would connectivity. Yeah, it would be like if they decided to take away television in the nineteen sixties. Yeah, So right. So in one in one sense, the whole discussion about emergence is really about how it's very possible that the way that we use social media and social networking sites uh and the way that it plays a role in our lives, UH, that we've only scratched the surface. No. I was going to say that the concept of the

meme comes back to six before social media sites existed. UH. Fellow named Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene and this this was an entire concept that was linking um the evolution of culture and pop culture specifically to to natural selection in biology. So it was saying that the way that genes are selected um and and processed over the course of evolution is the same way that that ideas are selected within culture. Right, Because ideas,

just like genes, are self replicating and they can change. Right, Like an idea makes a copy of itself when you share it with somebody else, But it can also mutate due to uh, either either misunderstanding or the person who receives that idea gene um, you know, changes it in some way before they pass it on. Yeah. So in a weird way, ideas follow the same mechanics as as our genes do. Um. And so when you get enough ideas churning about in a complex system, you might generate

something that's known as a meme. Plex got it that it's all these memes interacting. It's kind of like a gene pool. And uh and what do you know? That idea has been taken to a slightly uh narrow. I mean you could say everything on the Internet is a meme, because it's all it's full of ideas. But on the Internet a meme has come to mean something a little

more specific. Um, it's a what is it? It's a It's a visual or aesthetic or or literally share able share able note of some kinds, usually usually a pretty small unit of information. Um. I would say colloquial speaking that that we when we say meme, we mean you know, um, well, I mean, okay, it's a trend. It's a trend, and it's a small amount of information. The format of that small amount of information doesn't matter. It could be a video,

it could be an image, it could be text. On on Twitter, for example, I would argue that hashtags are really just a meme enabler. Right. There are people who will come up with some sort of clever joke or some maybe it's not even a joke, it might be something very serious, and they do a hashtag to kind of separate that out from other from from the noise, if you will, of Twitter, and other people may or

may not pick up on it. And if they do pick up on it, then it really becomes a meme where other people are taking that, adding to it, changing it, transforming it in some way, and passing it on into a greater network of folks. Yeah. Cool story bro um. So if you just take uh cats for example, that probably the internet's favorite meme, right, They're they're big, They're big. Yeah, I hear they're big um cats on the internet. What is the cat meme plex? Who's controlling it? Cheeseburger? It's

probably cheeseburgers. Yeah, But but there is no one in charge of the of the cat meme plex. I mean that's probably meme plex probably isn't the right word there, but the but there's a living, breathing organism of you know, kind of a cat, isn't it. No? No, I mean bigger than a cat, like a like like a Kira style, like if you've glued a whole bunch of cats together like that, kind of which reminds me of slime molds. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no no, slime molds totally go for it. Slime molds

being a five starum polycephalum um. And these are these are single celled organisms. It's almost like I've talked about slime it's before in front of say a hundred and seventy children this one time. Um. But that's a story for another time. Uh uh. Julian Robert over it stuff to blow your mind, have a really cool podcast episode

about this. But in in brief, these are single celled, brainless amiba that can that form these colonies, these moving thinking colonies that um that divert resources to uh to policing to get bacteria out of there. That will you know, if if they run out of food in the immediate area, they will form a little slug like creature and move to another location. Um. They also spread out very long

ten drils to discover where food might be. And if they encounter evidence of a pathway that they've already crossed, then instead of expelling more or expending more energy, I should say, instead of expending more energy in order to trace that same path again, it won't. Yeah, there's no brain there, kind of like lol cats. Lol cats, I don't know that we can say they don't have a brain.

The interesting interesting thing to me the low cats. The interesting thing to me is that that one you had this original kind of whatever, The original idea was of the cute kitty cat picture with the funny caption going on the internet and people thinking it was amusing and

and then sharing it. Then someone said, oh, I should, Uh, this would be really funny if I changed the caption to this, And then they go in and they change the caption so it says something else, and then they share it, and then someone else says, oh wait, what if I took a picture of a totally different cat and either put the same caption on or to a new caption on and it took such a life that

now everyone knows what lol cats are. That if you say low cats, everyone who is on the internet for any length of time is going to be able to think of an example that meets that that word. And what's really fun hold them how to make one right? Yeah, it's emergent behavior in that sense. So and but we see this in lots of different ways. On the Internet.

And the whole point about the social networking uh episode was that this is something that's happening right now with the way we use social networks, and that we can't predict how that's going to play a part in our lives in the future. We just know it'll be a big part, right, I mean, this is one of the things that makes the future of the Internet so exciting

is because it has it has their nodes everywhere. There's no top down control, nobody's in charge of the Internet, and the Internet itself and the Web are emergent, right, you know what I mean? They are themselves examples of emergence that are full of smaller examples of emergence. One great thing that I I don't think I ever would have predicted, but in retrospect it seems so obvious is

the emergence of wikis. I mean, but I mean, put me in nineteen seventy and say, I'm I'm working on our bonnet and you know, we're predicting something like the Web. How could I possibly have imagined wikis? I mean, it seems so obvious now, Like I said, but well, and these are emergent behaviors because they're created by users. Nobody's really in charge, or I guess you can have some editors,

but that depends on each one. You know, they're they're perfectly emergent, right and they do have they do have their own sets of rules in the sense of wikis. It may be in this and whatever the rules of what's permissible to post it may be, or it may just be even more simple than that. It may just be the actual mechanics of the wiki itself, and that you know, the complexity arises as more and more people

join and contribute and consume this. Uh. One I think is interesting is that with the Internet it's even more difficult to predict any sort of emergent behaviors than it would be in in other systems, because in other system presumably you would be able to at least determine what the basic rules are for each individual element that's in

that system. Right now, we've already established that just because you even know all the rules, you can't really know what the complexity will be of the overall system, because the sum the whole is greater than the sum of

its parts. Right And you also on the Internet have a have a little bit of doubt about who the actual participants are going to be because it's it's such a huge it's such a huge complex system that you know, it's not like a flock of birds where you say, oh, well there's fifteen birds got it well and and there there's not the established rules, like we don't have a

set of rules that everyone follows. There are rules within different groups that are on the Internet that follow you know, they're mostly you know, things that are they may not even be uh vocalized or written down in any way, but people just come to understand, oh, you don't do such and such, even though that's not stay in a rule anywhere. That's just it's kind of bad protocol or

it's bad form. For example, like I see this in in communities all the time, where someone will post something completely innocently or at least seemingly innocently, and then the response immediately comes back saying, no, you don't do that here. That's not that's not okay, even though that's not explicitly said anywhere. This sort of has evolved over time as the system has become more complex. Knowing that this is

not something that we want happening here. It happens all the time in games in particular, But we don't have an actual uh coda for for rules of the Internet. I mean there there are a lot of joke ones discuss here. Don't feed the trouble well, you know, but but there you see them often in groups that are for better or worse. The people who who often think of themselves as owners of the Internet, like uh forge

Chan and Anonymous are two good examples. They have their own sets of rules, most of which are jokes, not all of which are, but most of them are. And uh in a way, the rules themselves have become a meme and the whole ideas it's fun to continuously add and tweak and change them. Um usually it's just adding. A lot of them don't like it when you change one of the rules, and they pay a lot of

attention to that. But uh, you know, they're they're not particularly they're not the rules that you're speaking from experience. Are you one who has tried to nail some precepts to the door of the anonymous Cathedral? Not so much that, But I've seen, I've seen what happens if someone posts like the rules to the Internet, but they either didn't copy and paste it, or they copied and pasted it, copied it from someplace that had the rules quote unquote wrong.

And then I've seen what they Oh yeah, no, no, I I look. I I write about this stuff and I blog about it, podcast about so I've I've been in these communities. I feel like a sociologist who's hung out with the Hell's Angels or something. But I've been in these communities in the mist, cats in the miss But it's they definitely, they definitely take their largely unspoken rules very seriously. Um and uh, or maybe it's not

seriously at all, And that's the problem. It's kind of hard to say when they certainly react with enthusiasm if you were to break one of their rules. Well, here's something I'm interested in asking, what are some of the most interesting emergent behaviors you've observed on the Internet and in social networking. Well, I mean, I can start off

with one of my own, but sure, go ahead. Well, I mean, I think one of the most interesting things is um again, the unpredictable way that especially Twitter, but social media in general has been used to spread news and information um like breaking news or like when there's a disaster when things break on Twitter before the news

stations pick them up. Yeah, and it's so interesting to watch the way that the message proceeds through the Twitter spheres, say, and and the way I think it's really interesting is that, Um, so it's not just I would say it is emergent, because it's not just a straightforward passing along of information like copy paste pass it along. I mean that that

would be fairly predictable. What it tends to be I think is that there is some of that, but then there's also a lot of passing of information by way of commentary on the information, and then there's a kind of cannibalistic message creation where the new message that's being shared becomes mainly the commentary from Twitter on the original

piece of information. Yeah, I will frequently, I mean, because because you know, I check into Twitter maybe once every thirty minutes, which sounds really a lot now that I

say that outline. That's great, um but but but you know, so, so I'll check in and I'll suddenly see half of my Twitter feed exploding about something, and It'll be Yeah, all of this oblique commentary or snarky commentary more more likely about some other thing that's happened, and I go in Google whatever the key word is to figure out what the actual news story is. Because from from those initial posts, I'm like, well, people are upset, but this must be a Tuesday. And it's like the story becomes

the conversation about the story, like that's what the story is. Well, and that became really evident during the Arab Spring. I mean that was the story was how social media allowed people to have a channel of communication not only to each other, but to the rest of the world during what would normally be an event where unless you had embedded journalists inside the country, you the rest of the world might not be aware of what was going on, and even then it would only be the world that's

paying attention to a particular outlet. I was gonna say, since you ask the question and you want to know what kind of emergent behaviors you found interesting, I find viral videos fascinating. And the reason why I find it fascinating is that the things that make a video go viral Essentially, it's just that a lot of people share it, right, But sharing does not mean that the video was of a particular quality or that it had a particular kind of humor to it or subject matter. It's it's completely

independent of all that. There's no formula for making a viral video, right You can try and you know, and see if you can hit into the zeitgeist, but that hardly ever works. It's funny to watch people in marketing like try to create viral videos. It's both funny and tragic,

like when a clown dies. But yeah, it's like you know, when you when you have seventy two hours or more a video uploaded every minute on YouTube, how is it that some videos get worldwide acceptance or are being shared like crazy and other videos that might be quote unquote

better don't. For example, if you had seen Gandham Style before it exploded, if you if you were one of the first people who watched it when it was uploaded, you might think that's kind of entertaining, But there's a there are thousand other videos from Asia that are equally weird and tongue in cheek and catchy, and because it really was, it was made to be this sort of cheeky, goofy,

silly song. But there are lots of of songs in that particular kind of genre that are coming out of well not just Asia but all parts of the world. Like old people get mad because they can't understand it. But see, to me, what it's not that I don't understand it so much as I don't understand why that one got shared versus all the millions of others. See, that's the thing that's fascinating to me. That's what I find fascinating about viral videos is that you can't predict

which one is gonna go viral. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where someone saw it, they shared it. All the people or a significant significant number of people who who saw it from the person who shared it then went on to share it, and then it just exploded. I didn't see that video until it was probably right at when it was peaking, or maybe just before it peaked. It was definitely before the radio started playing it. But

but that was to me that was interesting. I watched I thought, this is it's entertaining, it's a funny video. It's there's I don't have any criticism against it. It's just interesting to me that that one goes viral like there's some When you watch it go viral, you can sort of figure out why because there's also this amazing

sense of shout in freuda across the Internet. So, for example, Rebecca Black's Friday video, because a lot of that was people poking fun at this young girl who she wanted to make a music video that was her birthday present, and like, if I were thirteen and I were living in this world now, that might be what I want to do too. I mean, that would be awesome. She was, you know, and she I think handled it way better than I ever would have considering the reaction to that

video and how it went viral. I mean, when Stephen Colbert shows up on Jimmy Fallon and is singing your song, that's kind of weird, right, so um, but at any rate like that, you can when you see a video like that, you think, all right, I can, I can see the elements here that would make this go viral and sort of a it will definitely a snarky, nasty,

mean spirited way. But I have an interesting question. Sure, have you ever been um unknowingly caught in the crest of a viral video wave, meaning like, did you share a video thinking it was something obscure um not realizing that it was in the process of blowing up or do you know what I mean? I like you in that unconscious person with it, you know, having no idea

that you're contributing to a mass phenomenon. I've definitely shared stuff where I thought it was really interesting and I thought other people would I like to see it, without

realizing how big it was going to get later. That has happened, but more frequently than not, I'm actually on the other end of the crest, like it's very usually late to the game, I am too, but it's been weird the few times where it's like, you know, maybe I saw some YouTube video I was like, Oh, this is funny, and I share it, and then like in a day or two, like everybody is huge, and I didn't realize, like, oh, I'm I was part of the wave that brought this. Yeah, I think, I think I'm.

I think the last one that I remember doing that with was Carmen's look At Me Now video, the cover of the Chris Brown song sung by the cute little rockabilly chick and her her adorable Jewish fiance. I don't think I know that it's adorable. It is so cool.

I think the last one for me was walk Off the Earth's cover of someone I used to know the got Your song because that was the five people playing the one guitar, which when I saw it, and I saw it right when they uploaded it, because I had heard of walk Off the Earth already and I when I saw that, I just thought, how creative to have this be your your music video that five people playing one guitar all at the same time and singing this song, and uh, and I shared it and then shortly thereafter

it I don't claim credit. I was just part of that that early group and then and then it couldn't claim credit made it or like, well, I mean if you are the who's to say who's the person who was the the domino that caused all the other ones to fall? Right? But probably most of those dominoes don't

know who that person is, That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I'm like, you can't know, not really, I mean unless you're just unless you're just one of those people who has millions of followers and there was like no one had heard of whatever the means. Yeah, when when someone like like George de Kay or Will Wheaton or you know these other these other gods of our Internet um step up in and reblogs. I'm just waiting for them to rename Facebook George d ka book because that's what

mine has turned into. It's true, yea, yeah, yeah, it's my My favorite is always and this is a little bit get off my lawn of me. But um, you know when when George d Kay posts something that I saw like four years ago on the internet and then all of my friends start reposting it, and I'm like, they never saw that thing or were they not on We'll see, Lauren, if you had shared it, then the meme would have already run its course. But really we're

blaming you. When did we fear off into such weird territory or emergin behaving eminhking about the mechanics then when you like the video, that's the mechanics of going no no, I believe you right. Well, that wraps up this discussion about emergence. I hope you guys found it interesting. If you have any topics you would like to have us address in future episodes of Forward Thinking, I highly recommend you get in touch with us, because that way we

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