In Cathy Davidson’s essay “Project Classroom Makeover,” she discusses a few unconventional forms of technology such as the educational classroom paradigm and standardization.
Cathy Davidson's "Project Classroom Makeover," Clo.Close Reading of "Project Classroom Makeover".
"Project Classroom Makeover" Close Reading.Steven Johnson's The Myth of the Ant Queen, Key Te.Search for Shared References within The Ecstasy of."The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism".
"The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism".Being within the ant colony would be the same form of sensory overload, just on a physically-smaller scale. It would be like standing within the city itself and noting all of the movements of the people within the city, the smells you can smell from standing on the sidewalk, the sounds of the bustling people and cars within the city, etc. Finally, complexity as described by Johnson as "sensory overload" (Johnson 198) can be likened to the ant colony or the city, by trying to place oneself in a situation where you can observe every instance of every interaction occurring within the system itself. "Disorganized complexity" (Johnson 203) is described as "problems characterized by millions or billions of variables that can only be approached by the methods of statistical mechanics and probability theory" (Johnson 203). An example of disorganized complexity would be the movement of molecules within a gas, or even the movement of an individual within a city as seen from a bird's eye view of the entire city. Johnson even describes several other forms of complexity - "disorganized complexity" (Johnson 203) and complexity that suggests a "sensory overload"(Johnson 198) - and applies ideas of those specific forms to other fields. A good example of this (in regards to the ants) would be the ants as a whole autonomously placing the cemetery as far away from the central point of the colony itself as possible, and the midden as close to the cemetery as possible without the two overlapping. The ant colony itself, according to a definition provided by Johnson on page 203, would be considered a form of "organized complexity" (Johnson 203) because the ants "follow specific rules and through their various interactions create a distinct macrobehavior" (Johnson 203). This seems to foreshadow that the rest of the anecdote would be describing complex systems within the ant colony, which it later does. It is used first in the anecdote concerning ants and his observations of the ant colony, when Gordon (presumably a professor of behavioral ecology) answers "borderline philosophical-questions.on complex systems" (Johnson 193). One keyword that is used across Johnson's essay in many different ways is the word, "complex" and it's derivatives.