Emergence Behavior and Network Culture

Question #6

The principle of emerge behavior is based on conducts that rise from another individual. It is a complex system created by patterns that come from many relatively simple interactions. Ant colonies use this efficient system even though individual ants have very little thinking. Ants follow a command or code and the intelligence of the colony as a whole relies on this characteristic, which is called swarm logic.

Analogies can be made to compare ant patterns and online social networks because an ant colony operates like a dynamic network. To make this comparison it is important to explain the five principles of emerge behavior that predominates in the ant´s world where there is no centralized planning and macro intelligence derives from local intelligence. The principles can be applied to online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram among others even though humans are thinkers. The principles are as follows:

More is different. This means that the more ants the colony has, the better decisions they make; for an ant is not the same to observe one or two ants taking another path that to observe hundreds. In a swarm, interaction networks develop as the colony grows older and larger. When the entire system is observed the global behavior is evident. Facebook is a website that enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images and the more friend a person has, the more interesting the application is. Ants have clear class distinctions that help them to maintain the social order.

The same happens in the enormous Facebook community where the user has close friends, friends with limited profile, friends, people from work and so on. Users classify their friends the way they want. When many friends “like” a page or an application, if that application has a lot of movement and popularity, a post in your newsfeed will appear suggesting to like the application or page. Then, a macro behavior...