The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software

By Steven Johnson

288 pages. Scribner. $25.

Steven Johnson's 1997 book, ''Interface Culture,'' remains one of the most thoughtful, literate studies yet published on the cultural impact of recent technological changes. Writing in lucid, user-friendly prose and drawing analogies from a prodigious range of fields (including literature, painting, architecture, philosophy and semiotics), Mr. Johnson made the provocative argument that the graphic interface -- those software-mediated interactions between users and computers -- is potentially ''a medium as complex and vital as the novel or the cathedral or the cinema.'' In much the same way that the novels of Dickens attempted to make sense of the galvanic changes unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, he suggested, today's high-tech interfaces are providing us with tools to grapple with the dislocations and data overload wrought by the information revolution.

In his latest book, ''Emergence,'' Mr. Johnson, who is the editor in chief of the online magazine Feed, focuses on a subject he touched on, in passing, in that earlier book -- namely, the phenomenon of self-organization, represented by feedback systems and intelligent software that anticipates our needs. This phenomenon, known as emergence, is embodied by ''bottom-up'' systems that use ''relatively simple components to build higher-level intelligence.'' Ants build complex colonies; city residents create distinct neighborhoods; simple pattern recognition software learns to recommend new books or music based on our previous choices. In each case, developments proceed not from some central authority dictating plans from above but from the cumulative actions of low-level agents below.

Given the somewhat abstruse nature of emergence, this book tends to be less immediately engaging than ''Interface Culture'' and more disorganized. Mr. Johnson must spend a lot of time explaining the concept of emergence and illustrating it with examples before he can look at its social implications, and he frequently repeats the same information from slightly different angles. Despite such difficulties, he once again demonstrates his range as a cultural historian and his ability to make the reader see connections among developments in fields as disparate as urban studies, evolutionary science and artificial intelligence.

In the course of ''Emergence,'' Mr. Johnson draws parallels between the ''climax stage'' in city life -- defined in the 1960's by Lewis Mumford as the point beyond which a city cannot grow without suffering deterioration and a loss of civic unity -- and the runaway growth being sustained by Internet communities today. He compares the changed expectations for rock music created by the daring work of early groups like the Velvet Underground to the exciting new possibilities being opened in the areas of software and game design by innovators like Eric Zimmerman, who created the game Gearheads. And he associates the collective intelligence exhibited by ant colonies (which, contrary to popular belief, are not led or directed by a ''queen'') with the ''bottom-up powers of emergence'' exhibited by games like the best-selling SimCity.

Mr. Johnson argues that ''some of the great minds of the last few centuries -- Adam Smith, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing -- contributed to the unknown science of self-organization, but because the science didn't exist yet as a recognized field, their work ended up being filed on more familiar shelves.'' ''They were wrestling with local issues, in clearly defined fields,'' he writes. ''How ant colonies learn to forage and build nests; why industrial neighborhoods form along class lines; how our minds learn to recognize faces. You can answer all of these questions without resorting to the sciences of complexity and self-organization, but those answers all share a common pattern, as clear as the whorls of a fingerprint. But to see it as a pattern you needed to encounter it in several contexts. Only when the pattern was detected did people begin to think about studying self-organizing systems on their own merits.''

That pattern was there to be found in studies looking at how our immune systems ''learn throughout our lifetimes, building vocabularies of antibodies that evolve in response to the threat posed by invading microorganisms.'' It was there in research showing how cells in an embryo ''self-organize into more complicated structures.'' And it was there in Jane Jacobs's descriptions of cities as organisms, capable of adaptive change from the street level on up.

In the last 10 years, Mr. Johnson observes, self-organizing systems have increasingly become part of our everyday life: online stores like Amazon.com have implemented them to track (and anticipate) our tastes, while Web sites like eBay have adopted them to regulate relationships between buyers and sellers. He predicts that personal digital television recorders like TiVo and Replay, which enable people to decide what they want to watch and when they want to watch it, will eventually lead to the demise of the network TV programmer; and he argues that in the future, ''the entertainment world will self-organize into clusters of shared interest, created by software that tracks usage patterns and collates consumer ratings.'' As for decentralization's effect on politics, Mr. Johnson points out that the anti-globalization protest movement (made up of smaller affinity groups representing specific causes) has already adopted a fragmented, leaderless form reminiscent of ant colonies.

This book does not convincingly illustrate the magnitude of change Mr. Johnson attributes to the self-organization principle; he predicts that it will usher in a revolution ''every bit as significant'' as the one unleashed by our harnessing of electricity. But ''Emergence'' does limn some of its burgeoning manifestations. And in doing so, it not only makes stimulating reading but also goads us to appreciate the process whereby the parts often add up to more than the whole.

Photo: Steven Johnson (Alexa Robinson/Scribner)