Emotional entropy
by Bob on July 7, 2007
There is a concept in Physics and other disciplines called "entropy". It has to do with order, disorder, and equilibrium.
In Information Theory, the brilliant Claude Shannon came up with a measure of entropy, or Information Entropy, in a communication system, which was a very profound idea.
Would that we would tactfully measure the information entropy of live seemingly valid personal communcations between people in our society, especially on cell phones or on instant messengers ! Our results might likely be startling in how little real communication there is.
Nevertheless, we resist the temptation to delve deeper into person communcations and their entropic characteristics to look into some interesing twists to entropy in a way which we normally don't think of it. That makes life interesting to do so.
We will discuss so called "Emotional Entropy". There seems to be a leading definition of it in human exprience and Psychology when referring to the panorama of emotional states when one has or is experiencing the loss and death of a loved one. Or in Sociology we find when we are talking about a society's standard of living and mental and emotional entropy of the people within that society.
Let's get a bit more banal than that. Let's look at emotional entropy as a state or measure of how much we are integrated into a chaotic world of feelings and people.
Put the case, as Dickens would have had his lawyer phrase it to Pip in "Great Expectations", that you don't write any emails or messages or make any phone calls or write paper letters or otherwise communicate to your friends and social connections -- all of a sudden. Then just wait. See if anyone calls you, or writes to you, or worries, or calls the authorities in search of you. Let the vacuum and closed system implode. Just see what happens. This may be a measure of social and emotional entropy as we know it.
If no one calls or tries to contact you, that's really something to think and worry about unless you are a primitive cave dweller.
If a few people call, then you have to evaluate who they are and if they are the people you would have wanted to have called when you went missing.
If everyone you know calls in on you, you're golden.
So we measure the emotional entropy of one's relationship system in a seeming dynamic equilibrium which sounds oxymoronic, but isn't actually.
Let's turn to e-communications and explore the emotional and social entropy and ecology of the closed system. Here's the rub. In this e-system where emails and mesages and immediate communication take place, and there is no way to reach a person by regular sensible methods, then the whole theory falls apart and takes a new meaning. For if someone doesn't send messages, post, or otherwise communicate in a social interactive network, like MySpace, there are several possibilities: (a) the person has deleted his account, (b) the person is ill, (c) the person has died, or (d) the person is apathetic all of a sudden about the interactions.
In any event, in the e-closed-system world, most people just assume someone lost interest or has other things to do when they are not active anymore. That's convenient but a fallacy in all likelihood as a general principle of social order on the e-spectrum. So it means if someone in the e-world is sick, we cannot help him because we don't know whom to call or inform, or how to knock on his door to look in on him.
So the emotional entropy is high in this e-system.
Don't sell your postage stamps yet. We may need them in this otherwise advanced electronic e-age.
One is cautioned by the principles on entropy.
However, great minds have written that out chaos comes order. Now that's a brilliant meditation in itself. As long as we can keep it all coherent in our heads.Wherever our heads really are -- following Descartes and his Meditations on Philosophy.
Then again, "Entropy" was the 18th episode of the sixth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on the TV airing in 2002. That has to mean something profoundly interesting.