Summary
It is fast becoming clear that our lives revolve around the powers of emergence. Order arrives from the bottom-up, not top-down. Complexity is resolved through simplicity. Everywhere the same laws are obeyed, the same swarm logic is at work. EMERGENCE looks at the cities we inhabit, the media frenzies we suffer and the games we play, showing how individual actions without central planning often create a wonderfully adaptive communal intelligence. In this compelling, revelatory book, Johnson investigates the artificial emergence which is bringing sweeping cultural and political change in its wake. Rich with insights into the future, this book allows us to witness the exhilating arrival and sudden ascendancy of a potent new idea.
Steven Johnson was born on June 6, 1968. He received an undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, and later went on to receive a graduate degree in English literature from Columbia University. He is the author of several books including Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age; Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation; The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America; and The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World. His book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, was the subject of a six-part series on PBS, which he also hosted.
(Bowker Author Biography)
