They are what we call emergent properties.

It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now.

It's turning into one of these big emergent systems

It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon.

Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts.

But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity.

I think I can make a guess now education is self organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope.

I think I can make a guess now Education is a self organizing system where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

So every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave and that emergent sine curve of fire.

Well, the bad news is that these robust and robust is a key word emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail.

It's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably not the result of a top down approach

And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems.

And I've come up with the definition that I rather like, which is that play is an emergent property of the application of rules to the imagination.

like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have.

And this proposal was a reaction to the over saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions, which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity.

And that was one of the reasons why the web wasn't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two way linking, you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things.

We're in a world where that human layer is so critical and so I think you're starting to see this kind of new layer where there's this powerful kind of secondary effect and emergent power that is purely delivered by good interactions, good interfaces, good ways of connecting people.

The question that I found myself asking to people when I was talking about the book afterwards is when you've talked about emergent behavior, when you've talked about collective intelligence, the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask, who builds a neighborhood?

So the most amazing thing about this and I'll end on this note is, most emergent systems, most self organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not.

The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all.