Society and culture

Information and entropy

moleitau9 Comments

After I was rambling on about definitions of information and entropy the other day, I remembered the master’s ruminations on that theme relating to September 11th 2001.

Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie -- This Is Information

» Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: This is Information
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9 thoughts on “Information and entropy”

  1. I would argue that the inverse is true. The more energy put into information — refinement, categorisation, summarisation — the more stable a structure you produce. You may have three disparate pieces of information that are tied together by a fourth, creating a new whole. Whereas the potential energy stored in a building tends towards collapse, becoming less cohesive over time, information has a tendency to coagulate and become more cohesive over time, as it is used and processed.
    Structural inkages in a building create tension, while linkages in information reduce tension (and the friction of assimilating two pieces of information vs. one).

    that’s about as far as i can take this metaphor…

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  3. I agree that information over time becomes ” more stable a structure” as it is “refinement, categorisation, summarisation” by groups of people. What that idea does not account for is ~revolution~ where groups of people rebel against those stable structures as they adopt different assumptions. Then just like the twin towers, the whole structre comes tumbling down.

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  4. Doesn’t it depend on whether you try to impose structure or allow structure to emerge? Chaos didn’t use to be a pejorative term and it doesn’t mean lack of structure.It’s the state of flux as new form emerges – trying to fix it (in both senses of the word) is the big problem.

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