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Silence Inside Systems: Roots and Generativity Consequences
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AI
DOI：10.1287/isre.2022.0586.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Silence as a system behavior has evaded attention in information systems (IS) discourse, where interaction predominates. It merits examination as systems grow brittle, brute-force countermeasures falter, and autonomous systems risk misbehaving. We conceptualize silence as dynamic system-wide behavior, theorizing how it drives IS generativity by coalescing developers' attention on temporally shifting slivers of a system's codebase. Using a supercomputer-scale model, we analyzed nearly 20 million tweaks over a quarter of a century in over a thousand systems, constructing 67,000+ evolving humanto-artifact networks to infer such behavioral dynamics. We show that silence breeds generativity by dynamically funneling developers' attention. We make three contributions. First, we introduce silence as a dynamic system-wide behavior rooted in system architecture. Second, we show silence's generativity consequences-halving degenerativity, doubling evolution speed, quadrupling releases, and spawning 600 times as many forks. Third, we uncover attention funneling as the mechanism linking silence to generativity.
Keywords:
attention
silence
chattiness
evolutionary dynamics
IS generativity
IT evolution
loose coupling
architecture
quietness
supercomputing methods
Miles Davis
Moore's law
Shikantaza
trace data
system behavior
Journal
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