from Emergence, p. 64:

“isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals.”

This observation by Steven Johnson had me looking up from the book with that “light bulb” going off above my head. He was noticing how intellectual ideas evolve, and how ideas being advanced by isolated or small numbers sit on the shelves in libraries and journals, disconnected and unnoticed by the masses. But once a small movement toward coalescence starts, the shift toward it becomes a colloboration , where the “slime-mold” notices the increase of trails toward this new “source”, the slime-mold cells join forces and combine.

The theological implications are intriguing

The theological consequences are evolutionary, which is REVOLUTIONARY to many systems of theology, which often tend toward “orthodoxy” and a call for unity, but emergence theory, as I see it applied to how Religious Commuities might evolve, is somewhat related to the “Noosphere” ideas adbanced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I wouldn’t be surprised to see hints of emergent theory findings from some of the pioneers Johnson mentions in his book. (Yep, I find several hits when I do the following Google search using “Steven Johnson” along with Emergence, and Noosphere)

Steven Johnson has a blog of his own

I also found this article, entitled Swarm Media and Self-Assembling Communities that I will read in the next few minutes

Steven Johnson’s weblog seems to havehad its comments section terribly boverrun by Spam comments, lines and lines of it. Nevertheless, I found a good article on the Dean campaign (Frank Rich on Dean)