Emergence 3 – The Rules – A Science – Our Only Chance?

by Rob Paterson

October 6, 2009 at 11:11 am · Filed under Emergent

Once before, at a time of great change – the Ending of the Ice Age – Mankind used Emergence to not only come through but to take a new place on the planet. Don’t we face the same kind of challenge today? Is not Emergence our best chance?

We have so little time that if we are to face our challenges directly and use Emergence as a process, that we have to know what to do. We have to know the science and hence the predictable rules?

Because we know the rules for electromagnetism, we can use them to change our world. My bet is that we we know the rules for how best to use the social energy of people, amplified by social media, we may change the world even more than when we first amplified our group potential when we acquired complex language.

Then we created consciousness.

We were able to discuss novelty into being – the very essence of Emergence. And for most of this time, all of this happened like this – face to face in small groups.

What might happen, if we can expand our circle from face to face to a global conversation but with the same intimacy? If the result 60,000 years ago was so momentous then – what might be our destiny now?

With our place in the world in such jeopardy, global warming, resource shortages, peak oil, political logjams – we don’t seem to be making any progress with our current way of “seeing” and “acting”. I wonder if our only hope to “see” our place more clearly and to “discover” solution that will work is to press for a larger process of Emergence. If we could harness a global conversation, what might be the result.

In parts 1 and parts 2 – I have done my best to offer a directional approach to this voyage of discovery.

Now we come to the hard part. What are the rules. For if social energy is as real as electro-magnetism, it will have rules.

That once we know them, we can make a break from mere speculation, techno babble and kumbya and design in the full power of social media to make this great link up that it offers. Then we can get to work.

Here is the concluding part of this 3 part series where I do my best to show how we might use emergence as a product of social software to do important things.