Third Meditation on Social Media: Segregation , Segmentation & Differing

You may recall that last week we broached the topics “social exclusion” and “social inclusion”. This week I wish to broaden our scope to consider something I’ll call “social diffusion” — and also even broader than that: the entropy of the universe.

Before you object and accuse me of having “lost the plot”, I want reassure you that my very tangential and novice treatment of this very modern and scientifically advanced topic will be extremely brief, superficial, will hardly scratch the surface and most of all: will not hurt (at least not extremely much).

It was not until 1865 that Clausius invented the word entropy as a suitable name for what he had been calling “the transformational content of the body.” The new word made it possible to state the second law in the brief but portentous form: “The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum,” but Clausius did not view entropy as the basic concept for understanding that law. He preferred to express the physical meaning of the second law in terms of the concept of disgregation, another word that he coined, a concept that never became part of the accepted structure of thermodynamics. [Martin J. Klein, “The Scientific Style of Josiah Willard Gibbs,” in “A Century of Mathematics in America,” 1989]
Search ‘entropy’ on etymonline [ www.etymonline.com/search?q=entropy ]

I wish to completely sidestep the past century (or more) of advanced mathematical conceptualizations and instead go immediately to my own “gut-feeling” interpretation of entropy as “the degree of order / disorder that exists” … or even more simply: how “mixed-up” something is. If (as we addressed last week) we wish to include or exclude particular individuals from our social “in-group” vs. “out-group” systems, we would need to till our garden and thereby create order (instead of allowing anything / everything to simply diffuse throughout the ether more / less randomly). Likewise, my hunch is that the vast majority of humans believe that there is indeed some sort of “good” order which is supposedly preferable to some sort of “evil” disorder. Chaos is normally interpreted as the opposite of any goals we aim to reach for (such as plucking an apple from a tree).

Now let me make a quantum leap to the fundamental theoretical thinking about the World-Wide Web. The basic idea is that of a distributed system — ideally, the web is completely decentralized. Just as the “real world” in which I live still seems to be reasonably ordered despite some so-called “laws of nature” maintaining the world is always and everywhere and forever becoming more disordered, so too the World-Wide Web also still seems to have a rather long way to go before anyone could reasonably begin to make a case that it might be even just a little bit decentralized, distributed, whatever. [1]

I feel that starting from these two insights we ought to now consider the historical evolution of our conceptual thinking. Let me just go out on a limb and simply state that “it all started with segregation” (e.g. in the first verses many ancient religious texts, there is some mention of “in the beginning, there was” and then a short list of how things were in a simple and straightforward manner). Since the unraveling of history made things more and more complicated, the world we have now is somewhat more complex. Or at least the world before the scientific revolution cleared it all up, right?

And yet, even though we now luckily have science, that’s not where this story ends.

The new and improved chapter of life is all about segmentation. Everybody wins, because for every purpose under heaven there is a widget. [2]

Yet personally I beg to differ. I don’t need no “slicing and dicing”, thank you very much. I don’t need no very fine print. No dark sarcasm in your trademarks. [3] Your ASS can go SPAM itself. [4]