ZDNet – “Physics dictates machines should minimize entropy, and humans are complying on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. 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…

…social media is a communications channel to recover the signal of the messages in aggregate, the totality of messages people send. If all two hundred million active users on Twitter are tweeting all day, or the nearly two billion active users on Facebook are posting, what is the signal that is supposed to come out of all of that? All the many messages form signals, the prevalence of themes, the amplification of gestures. The total signal could be progressive politics in some cases, conservative politics in another, or football, or computer programming styles — just about anything.  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. Social media is the next-order derivative, if you will, of human communication — the emergent signal of mass behavior…”