Writing like a flock

Abstract

Theories and practices of self-organization have spread broadly in recent decades, through academia to business management to software development to disaster relief planning to progressive political activism, and so on. The question this paper addresses is whether self-organization can also become a viable mode of cultural analysis. Using the experience of January 2007, when a varied group of scholars convened in Las Vegas to ‘swarm’ the Consumer Electronics Show, I examine in detail this question of swarm-as-method. The ‘swarm scholarship’ we road-tested at the convention is suggestive on a number of levels, but foremost for the way it challenges fundamental norms and expectations surrounding authorship. A mode of scholarship such as our swarm stands little chance in the University, I argue, because it requires a different environment of rewards and incentives than currently dominant in the research culture of academia.

Keywords:

• empire
• International Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
• assemblage
• swarm scholarship
• autopoeisis
• authorship

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jeremy Engels for offering feedback on an early draft, and of course his fellow swarmers for their continued input and support.

Notes

1. There were 15 scholars all together, both faculty and graduate students, from a variety of institutions and disciplinary backgrounds, arriving from all points on the national compass. Over the course of four days the group met and chatted, attended the convention, took notes, re-met, re-chatted, re-attended the convention, wandered off, formed clusters, held miniature discussions, and so on throughout the entirety of CES. This ongoing daily collaboration was inspiring (and, given the enormous size of the event, physically exhausting), as it fostered the development of research ideas on a large-scale cultural event in real time. We discussed thoughts as they were forming, floated hypotheses, and encouraged and discouraged developing arguments in the hopes of generating quickly publishable analyses of the event.

2. Contractor notes an important distinction between chaos theory and theories of self-organization. He writes, ‘Whereas chaos theory seeks to explain the creation of chaos from order, self-organizing systems theory seeks to explain the emergence of order from chaos’ (1999, p. 1).

3. For a longer and more nuanced view of the history of ‘emergence,’ tracing the concept all back to Aristotle and following its path through late nineteenth-century theories of natural selection to the twentieth-century theories of self-organizing systems, see Corning (2005, pp. 123–139). While his account adds greater depth to Johnson's historical narrative, the two accounts are not at odds.

4. The first version of the game was developed in 1985 for the Commodore 64, but it was not actually published until four years later (‘The History of SimCity’). Initial success came slowly, but through word of mouth the game began to garner the attention of educators and even the CIA and the Department of Defense. Thus, a sequel was released in 1994, SimCity 2000 – the first ‘bottom-up’ version, developed in concert with player feedback – which was the top selling game in the world that year.

5. UNLV's journal databases also list 93 periodicals that contain the word ‘network’ in their titles.

6. It needs to be stressed that CES does not actually ‘disassemble.’ Even after all the businesses take down their booths, and after all the attendees catch their return flights home, the event itself lives on. Emails continue to circulate, with invitations to take surveys and to start preparing for next year's show; news reports and trade publications refer back to last show and anticipate the next. This is part of the event's ‘diffuseness.’