Alex Wright has an excellent post entitled Probability, Superstition and Ideology in which he uses the fasces - the ancient Roman term for a bundle of sticks that symbolized the strength gained by the collective when the comparatively weak individuals are bound together - as a parallel to emergent technology. This works on a basic level, but also draws a line between fascism and this type of behavior: a bleak comparison for what is most often seen as the democratization of media and technology.

Wright is writing in response to Chris Anderson's argument that instances individual inconvenience in the creation and function of an emergent system matters little when compared to the operation as a whole. What interests me in his, and other similar writing, is this interaction between the individual and the global, the feedback. I touched on this in an earlier post in which I argued that an individual participating in a system like that of del.icio.us cannot avoid inlfuence from the global behavior. In this case it is on a structural level in that del.icio.us suggests certain tags for when the user is classifying an item. Yet in other systems, feedback seems to play a vital role in creating regulation of individual action in an environment otherwise lacking, or with minimal centralized regulation.

This requires the individual to be aware of the global effect s/he is participating in, but the result is a more static global result. Obviously, there is a range of possible action. The global action of system with no possibility for feedback would be able to shift rapidly in response to the interactions of its participants; the global action of a system with no possibility for action other than feedback (if such a system were even possible in the first place) would be completely static, the participants would be unable to react except as the global level dictates - making the impossible for a global action to exist at all.

For many, the ideal system with emergent properties would be one without feedback. Here I'm thinking of Thomasl Vander Wal's comment on the earlier post mentioned before. Yet having some level of feedback acts as a non-invasive and adaptable form of control. The likely result is a more stable global action which, in many cases, would be more useful than an unstable one.

To speak of specifics we could look at the folksonomic properties of del.icio.us or Flickr. Both these systems provide a certain level of feedback on a very basic level by making the participants aware of the global effect stemming from their inter/actions. The result is that the global action becomes a participant in its own making. If I see that most del.icio.us users who have tagged Page X have tagged it with "weblog", I will be more likely to use that tag than something like "blog". The global action has influenced the individual inter/action.

In Six Degrees, Duncan Watts explains that this phenomenon is a demonstration of a system that exhibits "local order":

"As long as A 'knowing' B and A knowing C implies that B and C are, in turn, more likely to know each other than two elements picked at random, then we have local order."

What the feedback does, then, is encourage local order within a system. The result in this type of situation will be certain elements (nodes, tags, etc.) being more highly connected than others. And isn't this what makes a system like del.icio.us and Flickr handy in the first place? It's through these highly connected elements that participants are able to navigate and make use of the system.