Emergence grows on me quickly

Just started reading Emergence, which I picked up at my local government-funded intellectual property redistributor (town library).

On first seeing that it covered practically all of the scientific/social topics that attract me most, my first reaction was something like "oh no, a thin popularization all my precious interests". But one chapter into it, I'm impressed by Steven Johnson's scope and presentation. It engenders the same excitement as James Gleick's Chaos, with a somehow even more direct (i.e. not journalistically packaged) style.

I'm excited to read further.

There's even a quote on page 39 that might summarize the reason for all that Gitlin writes about in Media Unlimited, cited from German cultural critc Walter Benjamin:

Perhaps the daily sight of a moving crowd once presented the eye with a spectacle to which it first had to adapt...[T]hen the assumption is not impossible that, having mastered this task, the eye welcomed opportunities to confirm its possession of its new ability.

Benjamin goes on to posit this as a source for impressionist painting, but Johnson is more onto Gitlin's theme in the preceding paragraph: "There is, first the more conventional sense of complexity as sensory overload, the city stretching the human nervous system to its very extremes, and in the process teaching it a new series of reflexes -- and leading the way for a complementary series of aesthetic values, which develop out like a scab around the original wound." I.e. we like the rush of images because we're calloused to it.

May 02, 2002 09:05 AM