Emergence

Network Capital
Complex systems emerge from interaction between common, simple and relatively different elements. For example, water droplets create glaciers, each snowflake is unique in its design, neurons create con- sciousness etc.

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The World Wide Web was developed in the 1980s. It was a global project to rapidly scale human connectivity. It had multi- ple actors and players involved—individuals, online service pro- viders, governmental regulators, website creators, etc. During the 2000s, in an unanticipated turn of events, the World Wide Web lead to the emergence of a new system of ‘social book- marking’ or ‘tagging’. Tagging gave birth to new structures and forms of information organization and creation. For the first time in human history knowledge and information production was crowdsourced. Along with crowdsourcing, this process also organ- ically produced a new universal language, semantics and format for tagging.

Just like the World Wide Web, there are multiple other examples of emergence in modern societies. They include the emergence of cities, economics (stock markets), language, AI, etc. In all of these cases of emergence, systems develop without a single-central orga- nizing entity. They develop, grow and scale spontaneously.

Recognizing the working and potential of the Emergence Theory is extremely critical. Numerous businesses and companies have lev- eraged the phenomena’s strengths to grow. Wikipedia and GitHub are the most remarkable examples of deliberate emergence.
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