fearroyo on "Art, Entertainment, Entropy"

Stevens argues that commercial entertainment is detrimental to a society’s access to new information and change because the entertainment industry as a whole relies on conditioned memory responses from the viewers to attract and consume the viewers. To support his argument, Stevens incorporates several aspects of the laws of thermodynamics; in an assumed closed system he defines a system as the human condition, or rather the creative thinking component of an individual, to compare and contrast the behavior of entropy with disorder and chaos brought about misinformation and redundant information that ultimately impede creative thought and change.

To maintain Steven’s argument, there are various instances of recycled information, or rather redundant information -as he states in the article, that serve an entropic purpose in the online media; particularly. Entropy is best summed up as the constant barrage of redundant information that is presented over so many instances in time, this information becomes misinformation that eventually adopts and stigmatized a particularly sort of behavior from the viewer. Internet memes such as “I can haz a cheeseburger”, or “I’m chargin’ mah lazor!” become instances of recycled, redundant information that ran rampant throughout the World Wide Web particularly through mediums such as youtube – which in turn provide a plateau of access to the same message, over and over again. Steven’s argument is present in the new interactive entertainment available to many viewers because popular sites such as youtube fulfill their purpose, to entertain. Entertainment in Steven’s argument is the mass reproduction of what was originally intended to be art, and as such internet meme’s are born. As the two examples provided earlier emerge as the copycats, or incomparable works to the original respective ideas. Fulfilling its purpose, sites such as youtube are an intermediate medium between connecting the viewers to the same redundant information through social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Friendster, and the list moves on. A viewer has an illicit response to such a popular viral video that may have become to overly popular within a short span of time, it becomes an internet meme, or at some point a parody of what the former message initially stood for; the viewer then generally expresses the expected response to the viral video. The information becomes redundant as it is posted, or commented on, saved, or recommended to a list of other viewers –friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, any range of network physical or electronic. Information, often times redundant information, through popular sites that attract literally millions of people worldwide, is passed around at an extraordinary rate as Stevens described that such an event reduces the overall amount of possibility for change, or new insight because the redundant information produces little if any new creative insight for the viewers to observe and interact with.