AdAptAtion As ConneCtion
47
of human power and control, such shifts in perspective put into question
well-established categories such as authorship and copyright, and thus
touch on one of the most vulnerable domains of culture, its value system.
Perhaps the most fundamental effect of distributed agency in complex
systems is that outcomes of media production become less predictable.
Through co-evolving processes that are entangled with each other, and
which interact in recursive, non-linear feedback loops, new things originate
which cannot be explained by an analysis of the single parts of which
they consist. This is what complexity theory calls “emergence.” It does
not mean that innovation is purely a matter of chance (or chaos) nor that
causal explanations for innovation do not exist. Instead, as Taylor has it,
“its occurrence cannot be accurately predicted” because too many factors
are entangled in too many interactions. 57 Emergence helps to explain
phenomena based on collective behavior, for example in information
technology or biology. For example, the complex architecture of an anthill
cannot be explained by looking at the thousands of ants that have built
it individually, but only by taking into account their interaction and thus
the self-organizational tendencies of the ant colony. In the context of
convergence culture, emergent patterns account for the seemingly erratic
directions media adaptations often take, not only but especially visibly
in the age of Web 2.0. Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with
an example of emergent media behavior. In the global circulation and
re-appropriation of Dino Ignacio’s digital collage of Sesame Street’s Bert
and Osama Bin Laden, which was printed off the internet, used by antiAmerican protesters, and eventually made its way back to the US on CNN
news, the interaction of different agencies (including the images themselves)
leads to multiple levels of signification in different contexts with often
surprising effects. Viral videos, memes, fan culture, and crowdsourcing
are other notions that display and rely on emergent properties, since they
reveal and bring forth patterns of self-organization in largely decentralized
media environments.
Process-orientation, distributed agency, and emergence are properties
of complex systems that radically challenge the notion of “fidelity” while
emphasizing the concept of “function.” If adaptation is seen not as an
exception but as a rule to cultural production and reception, the focus on
process and development weakens the status of both “origin” and “author,”
thus de-temporalizing cultural consumption. Despite a paradoxical (or, one
could argue, compensatory) fetish for “the original” as well as a necessarily
57 Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 137.
47
of human power and control, such shifts in perspective put into question
well-established categories such as authorship and copyright, and thus
touch on one of the most vulnerable domains of culture, its value system.
Perhaps the most fundamental effect of distributed agency in complex
systems is that outcomes of media production become less predictable.
Through co-evolving processes that are entangled with each other, and
which interact in recursive, non-linear feedback loops, new things originate
which cannot be explained by an analysis of the single parts of which
they consist. This is what complexity theory calls “emergence.” It does
not mean that innovation is purely a matter of chance (or chaos) nor that
causal explanations for innovation do not exist. Instead, as Taylor has it,
“its occurrence cannot be accurately predicted” because too many factors
are entangled in too many interactions. 57 Emergence helps to explain
phenomena based on collective behavior, for example in information
technology or biology. For example, the complex architecture of an anthill
cannot be explained by looking at the thousands of ants that have built
it individually, but only by taking into account their interaction and thus
the self-organizational tendencies of the ant colony. In the context of
convergence culture, emergent patterns account for the seemingly erratic
directions media adaptations often take, not only but especially visibly
in the age of Web 2.0. Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with
an example of emergent media behavior. In the global circulation and
re-appropriation of Dino Ignacio’s digital collage of Sesame Street’s Bert
and Osama Bin Laden, which was printed off the internet, used by antiAmerican protesters, and eventually made its way back to the US on CNN
news, the interaction of different agencies (including the images themselves)
leads to multiple levels of signification in different contexts with often
surprising effects. Viral videos, memes, fan culture, and crowdsourcing
are other notions that display and rely on emergent properties, since they
reveal and bring forth patterns of self-organization in largely decentralized
media environments.
Process-orientation, distributed agency, and emergence are properties
of complex systems that radically challenge the notion of “fidelity” while
emphasizing the concept of “function.” If adaptation is seen not as an
exception but as a rule to cultural production and reception, the focus on
process and development weakens the status of both “origin” and “author,”
thus de-temporalizing cultural consumption. Despite a paradoxical (or, one
could argue, compensatory) fetish for “the original” as well as a necessarily
57 Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 137.