Key Term: "Patterns"

Throughout the essay "They Myth of the Ant Queen," Johnson develops the idea that patterns can be found in what appears to be the most complex systems. He redefines “Patterns” on page 199 when he calls them “signals emerging where you would otherwise expect only noise” (Johnson 199).  

When I used to think of patterns, I would just think of a repeated series of symbols or actions. Johnson explains that patterns can be more than that because they can emerge from the bottom up. With the Manchester example, he shows how people’s behaviors formed a pattern that designed the city. He says, “They are patterns of human movement and decision making… that are then fed back to the Manchester residents themselves, altering their subsequent decisions” (Johnson 199). This shows that individuals can create patterns that can affect future decisions and patterns. He further explains the idea of learning through emergent patterns when he refers to creating computers that can read. The computer he described associated specific shapes with certain letters, and through repetition, was able to learn how to recognize handwriting. Patterns are the easiest way to simplify complex series and variables. The different sections of Johnson’s piece have little in common except that, in each case, a unique pattern was discovered.

Johnson relies on several individuals, or variables, in order to see the emergent properties that form when they are interacting. In a similar way, Davidson relied on a crowd to obtain the greatest information through crowdsourcing. In both cases, we are able to discover something more by seeing the big picture than if we focused on one single person/item.

I feel that, in Davidson’s essay, she was trying to convey that the public school system has fallen into a routine pattern that needs to change. She said “The biggest problem we now face is the increasing mismatch between the traditional curricular standards of content-based instruction and the new forms of thinking required by our digital, distributed workplace” (Davidson 60). Her iPod experiment was exactly the same kind of bottom-up learning that Johnson referred to when he discussed the computer that learned to read. The iPod represents an unknown variable that was adapted into society, and subsequently changed the pattern of the traditional school system.