[Reader-list] Ectropy Index

[Iram Ghufran]

Ectropy Index
Produced at the Sarai Media Lab

A hyperlinked, multimedia CD to be exhibited and distributed at World - 
Information City event, Bangalore. 14th - 19th November, 2005

The word "ectropy" means a general increase in organization. It appears 
to have been developed by Willard V. Quine, a philosopher and  
mathematician in the course of a series of discussions about information 
in 1969. It is now understood as an antonym of "entropy", If entropy is 
the net increase in the tendency towards chaos within a system, then 
ectropy being its opposite, suggests a congealing and thickening of 
information from a mass of things known, half known and unknown.

While imagining ectropy it helps to think of a circle, that denotes a 
neutral state. Any inward collapse of the circle in a cardioid fashion 
denotes the loss of the order. or entropy, and the outward radiation of 
the circle, leading to an increase in it's circumferential arc , is 
ectropy. An ectropic index then would be the measure of the increase of 
information, or of order, in a given system.

'Ectropic Index' takes these meanings to create its own tension between 
entropic and ectropic impulses, between forces that tend to increase and 
decrease the levels of order and systematization (as opposed to 
randomness) within a system.

Interestingly, ectropy is also a disease of the eyelid, which especially 
afflicts hyper-thoroughbred (or inbred) hunting dogs and people who have 
artificial eyes. In this disease, the eyelids do not close 
satisfactorily, leading especially to a slackening of the muscles of the 
lower eyelid, so that the orbit of the eye comes loose, and portrudes, 
ectropically, from its socket. Eyes that do not blink, or sleep, or 
never shut to occasionally 'not see' something, tend towards ectropy. 
The eye that wants to be all seeing, that wants everything in order, all 
the time, better beware of ectropy.

It is said that we live today in a social realm increasingly marked by 
activities that have to do with information. Identity cards and identity 
theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance cameras and shadows , 
data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to 
define significant features of the topography of contemporaneity. Here, 
in this zone falls the glare of the searchlight, surrounded by the 
thickening fog of the unknowable.  A host of everyday practices, ways 
of  make do and make believe provoke the anxieties of agencies deeply 
invested in knowing all that can be known. And all that can be known 
takes recourse and refuge in the unknowable. This is the ground that 
this work walks through. Here you can find logs of ongoing research at 
Sarai on information and society, and a random harvest of images and 
fragments of information, from the world wide web, from the street 
nearby, from far away shores, and from right under our noses.

Welcome, enter, and take your  own measure of the ectropy index.

Ectropy Index is the third part of an 'Infoface' which also includes, 
'The Global Village Health Manual' (2000) and 'The Network of No_Des' 
(2004).

Credits:

Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS by
Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Raqs Media Collective and Iram Ghufran with 
research notes by Taha Mahmood. (November, 2005)

With support from the European Union- India Economic Cross Cultural 
Programme