Emergy evaluation of DNA and culture in ‘information cycles’

Abstract Explication of the ‘information cycle’ and its energy basis is a crowning component of H.T. Odum's theorizing of general systems. This paper applies the information cycle to cultural information. Specifically, the information cycle concept is applied to one domain of information production, regular conversation. The transformities of conversation production are estimated by adopting principles from Odum's rainforest examples where he estimated transformities of information flows of various kinds, specifically, the emergy to copy units containing information, emergy to isolate and extract information, emergy to sustain an information cycle, and emergy to develop new information. The second and third kinds have been evaluated for conversation. Transformities of conversation follow a similar pattern of increasing values (2.21E15 and 1.50E16 sej/J, respectively). These results are compared with two other studies of cultural information production, one for television media and one for education. Taken together, these results suggest that cultural information is in fact a nested hierarchy of cultural information scales, with transformities that increase in order, with conversation first, then media, and finally education. This paper indicates how conversation can be illuminated as an information cycle, and located in a hierarchy of information production.

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