112. Loss of information, differentiation and life

 Baudrillard said that with modern communication we are flooded with information and that ‘more information yields less information’. How can this paradoxical statement be understood? He also said that ‘what flourishes by the same must perish by the same’. What does that mean?

In so-called information theory the degree to which information is informative is modelled in terms of its improbability, as a measure of its surprise value. Predicting the outcome of the toss of a coin (head or tails) is less informative than predicting the outcome of the throw of a dice (six possibilities). Known, familiar, trite, cliché propositions have little surprise value and hence low information value. Confirming an established view, practice or theory is less informative than refuting it and coming up with a new, distinctive, contrary one.

In the preceding item in this blog I went along with Baudrillard’s claim that with present communication technology people tend to assimilate themselves in groups of like-minded people, with similar ideas and habits, and that this reduces variety and cognitive distance, in a kind of intellectual incest. Conspiracy theorists seek each other out to nurse their favourite grudge. Lesser differentiation within groups narrows individual identity and merges individuals into hyperidentities. How fast and far this goes depends on how closed a community is, on how few outside relations members have.

Now, the measure of uninformativeness used in information theory is the same as the measure of entropy, lack of differentiation of energy states, used in thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a closed system differences in energy states decay. When two bodies of different temperature are brought together they will exchange heat until temperatures are the same.

Here we see a parallel with the decay of information in the loss of differentiation in babble within closed social groups. Views and ideas converge to the same.

One definition of life is that it goes against the increase of entropy, in producing differentiated, distinctive, improbable forms of life. To do that, a form of life cannot be a closed system and must ingest food and excrete refuse to maintain its distinctive structure. Death yields decay into an undifferentiated mass, a chaos, of elementary particles.

Now I can understand Baudrillard’s claim that more information is yielding less information, in two ways.

First, with communication technology there is an explosion of messages and images thrown around, but much of it arises from repetition, duplication, redundancy, amplification, reverberation in the internet, and from impulsive, unreflected and unargued utterances. Opinions rather than facts. Ease and low cost of communication allow for lower effort, in an explosion of triviality, a disintegration of information, a swell of entropy.

Second, what people send and select, the babble of what people tell each other within groups, has decreasing surprise value. In internally oriented, homogeneous social groups there is loss of cognitive distance, loss of differentiation in views and ideas. We can now say that this goes against life, constitutes a form of decay, a form of death.

Intolerance, closed minds, parochialism, chauvinism and nationalism are killers of cultural life. For life to remain, in communication, we need to break open closed communities. To live, closed systems must be opened to ingest and to defecate.

Indeed, as Baudrillard said: what flourishes by the same will perish by the same.