The Net is a Playground of Entropy

It may be fun to surf the Net and follow things randomly, but there's value in structure. The Net is a playground of entropy--the structurelessness that occurs when energy dissipates from a system. Yes, the Net also fosters self-organization, when individuals apply their energy, selectng and filtering information for others (aided by search and filtering tools). But there's rarely uch internal structure to what's selected; the structures created by links are usually webs of cross-references rather than a clarifying analytical framework. The Net is good at showing that things are related, but not how. Does this item support that one, or refute it? What was de Gaulle's role in history? What mistakes did he make that we can learn from?

There's much more logical power to an argument about abortion than to a set of pictures of fetuses, on the one hand, or interviews with women whose lives were ruined by unwanted children or with those unhappy children themselves. Yes, the latter can make us feel, but can they make us think rationally? Pictures can give us texture, but they can't expose the logic of the arguments or the trade-offs implied. What is the cost of raising all those unwanted children, in money and in blighted lives? What would have been the alternatives? How can you show a hypothesis?

The world "mother," with all its resonance, is far more powerful and meaningful than pictures of a single mother or of several. Moreover, a picture may have unintended side effects, as when the picture looks like a particular person rather than the reader's own mother--which is presumably what the creator intended the recipient to think of. Often, you want teh universality of a symbol rather than the particulars of an example

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The net is information entropy in the way things are associated, without strong semantic connections, but mere relations in links.