Blog 8

I’d have to admit I was a skeptical of what the purpose of our activity this Wednesday. I thought it was kind of silly and was sure that this would be some sort of waste of our time. I was proven wrong. I learned something as well as everyone else did about human behavior. Some emergent behavior that I witnessed was in the dinosaur exercise. During this exercise after we were giving our instructions to form a dinosaur everyone just stood where they were for a few seconds and just laughed. I know the first thing that went through my head was, "where would we even start?" After a while people started talking to the person next to them and a sort of plan was under way. Groups of people formed, and even declaring what parts of the body they were, like “I’m the tail!” What I believe what was supposed to be seen as experimental behavior was how people adjusted to what everyone else was doing. If everyone just started to do their own thing there would be complete chaos. But due to some people grabbing a leading role and others following, in time a structure was made. This is very similar to the internet. People don’t just try to do their own thing. People follow others into different areas they want to be. And it forms and interconnecting structure or even picture. But even being part of a smaller group or “tail” different groups form together to create that picture, and our picture was a dinosaur.