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Physics explains why there is no information on social media

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C C Offline
https://www.zdnet.com/article/physics-ex...ial-media/

EXCERPTS: Anyone who has watched a dozen videos on TikTok with the same dance moves, or read innumerable tweets with the same canned expressions knows that there's very little information on social media.

That is not an accident -- it is by design. Social media apps are communications channels, but communications of a particular kind. They are designed to transmit an aggregate signal of all the things people are saying, and in so doing, boost advertising revenue. To do so, social media seeks to minimize what is known as entropy, which is basically equivalent to minimizing information.

It all goes back to physics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics was formulated in the nineteenth century. It says that entropy increases in the universe over time. The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann gave the first statistical interpretation of the Second Law. Boltzmann said that over time, the probability of every possible energy state of particles in matter increases, so that it becomes more and more difficult to predict the state of matter with certainty.

The classic illustration of entropy is a glass falling and breaking. A broken glass doesn't put itself back together. Things break down and become less certain -- the universe becomes less organized, not more. That is time's arrow, and our experience of life.

In 1948, the famous Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon applied Boltzmann's statistical theory to information...

[...] Flash forward to social media. Social media is also trying to recover a signal from noise in a communications channel. But what kind of communications channel is social media?

It's not a communications channel between people [...] social media is a communications channel to recover the signal of the messages in aggregate, the totality of messages people send. ... The content is not important, what's important is that it amounts to an increasingly clear signal. Whatever the signal is, it is the totality, not the individual messages. ... the emergent signal of mass behavior.

And that's where entropy comes into play. Seen from social's point of view, the good entropy -- the unpredictability of lots of people doing stuff on the Internet -- is also the bad entropy, in the sense that it may make the received signal highly uncertain.

People chattering away are like Boltzmann's ideal gas, where the particles become increasingly hard to predict. Something has to reduce entropy. The glass has to put itself back together.

[...]  Humans on social media understand on some level that reducing entropy is important. That's why they voluntarily work with the system to reduce entropy.

Mindful of likes and follows, humans will choose behavior that reinforces predictability. [...]  examples of people making every message redundant so that the signal comes through the noise.

People will, of their own choosing, reduce their entropy and align with the machine. Every time someone on Facebook chooses to recirculate something known to produce oohs and ahs, and every time someone prepares the perfect sunset beach photo for Instagram that can be assured to receive "likes," if accompanied by the proper hashtag, it is an instance of self-shaping behavior, the voluntary reduction of entropy, and, hence, the reduction of information.

Memes, the use of a single, recognizable image, are a form of data compression, and also the quintessence of entropy reduction. All the possible ways to speak can be reduced to a visual utterance that is already in circulation among most people. The meme conveys no information precisely because it gives all who see it the predictable behavioral signal they already possess. 

[...] Do humans get anything in the bargain? The signal that is transmitted by social media is not meant for human consumption. It is meant to be plugged into another machine, the advertising buying machine, especially the machine known as programmatic ad buying, which responds reflexively to data. Whether humans enjoy social media, or learn anything from social media, is irrelevant.

Of course, humans don't feel that way. Anyone who has posted a vacation picture on Facebook feels that they are not merely participating in collective activity, but sharing information, and also conveying meaning. And that may be true on some level.

Without getting into the philosophical implications of shaped, and self-shaping, behavior -- "See how great my vacation is!" -- whether such acts are information-rich is irrelevant to the machine if those utterances don't monetize. Because then they don't help to recover the buying signal of advertising.

To social media, most human behavior, including your vacation pictures, is just noise... (MORE - missing details)
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