three violins & lsd commuters - language as a self-organizing system
This is a fairly good story that I told for years, never imagining that it would be the perfect language metaphor. When my ex-wife and I first arrived in Korea, I noticed two things immediately: first, everyone walked on the left side of the sidewalk. Second, it rained every afternoon (of monsoon season), a light but steady rain. One day I saw three middle-school (?) girls walking together holding three violins; they had only one umbrella, but were keeping all of the violins dry by walking completely and absolutely in harmony.That's something you would never see in the States, I thought to myself.
Years later I came home and was working and living in Chicago one summer when, commuting from the far north to the far south one summer morning, I found myself on Lake Shore Drive going about 70, bumper-to-bumper, with six lanes of traffic all going 70. Nobody dared hit the brakes- you stop, it's disaster going back for miles. As long as everyone goes 70, it's fine, it can stay bumper-to-bumper and we all get to work faster.
The American version of the violins, I decided.
I bring this up as a language metaphor because both are examples of self-organizing systems...individual organisms, not being told what to do from above, but deciding among themselves that organization is mutually rewarding...and imposing upon themselves the ideal form of collective organization...not that it's bound to stay that way, or that it would happen that way in every similar case...only that, at that moment, it's recognized as the best way to go about getting each individual goal reached. Each member of the collective group is acting as an individual...is participating willingly...and has the usual human motives - some good, some bad.
The story is interesting as it reflects the cultures too...and shows that, though culture influences the way these things develop, the laws involved, laws of physics, are universal. And I'd like to get to the bottom of them.
Labels: self-organized systems
posted by tom @ 7:24 PM
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