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At the very heart of human interaction is emergent cooperation. Whether the situation is a regular conversation, an organizational work group, an improvisational performance, or a complex crime network, communication is always an emergent and evolutionary process. The nature of emergent systems is relevant to communicative systems because it is the interaction and interdependence of components that allows emergence to take place. System (network) components (see social networks covered in the March 1^st blog) can be humans in an improvisational music group, agents in computer simulations (see December 31^st, 2005 blog), or organizational managers in a task group. Regardless, the interaction and coordination of components is necessary for a system to emerge as a specifically communicative system, a communication network.

A situation that exemplifies cooperative evolution is the crime network depicted in the Numb3rs episode “In Plain Sight.” Crime networks are becoming increasingly decentralized, as centrally controlled networks are inherently vulnerable. The decentralized nature of these networks makes it difficult to dissolve the entire network by removing any specific individual, or node. Likewise, coordination within a decentralized network is equally difficult to maintain due to the lack of central hubs, flock theory models the maintenance of decentralization in a communication network.

Emergence research has outlined some of the substantive elements of evolutionary systems, because the nature of the states of entities within such systems is fairly well defined. In general however, this effort has not been explicated in terms of emergent communicative interaction in networks. Flock theory models the network evolution of human interaction via communication using a combination of self-organizing systems theory, network theory, and emergence theory.

Flock theory may be viewed as an emergent theory of decentralized human interaction. The throng of collective action between flock members exemplifies the self-organizing ability of individuals that, despite their complexity, can demonstrate cooperative evolution. The coordinating ability of birds is viewed as an exemplar that is used to elucidate structure, while simultaneously establishing mechanisms of interaction that serve as a foundation for several constructs, and extended application to the small world phenomenon (i.e. six-degrees of separation).

The three main constructs that comprise flock theory are 1) structural distance, 2) collaboration, and 3) decentralization. Flock theory expresses a model for decentralized group organization, yet the means by which the group communicates and maintains a cogent knowledge of group goals and status, i.e. global information, is based on a roadmap based coordination system. By using a roadmap, or a knowledge network, there can be local organization and global information. Further, the self-organizing system can be treated a bipartite network (used in the “Protest” episode) where the structure and roadmap serve as the two modes of the two-mode network.

Reference article:

Rosen, D. (2002). Flock theory: Cooperative evolution and self-organization of social

systems. Proceedings of the 2002 CASOS (Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems) Conference. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.