The successful self-replication of information patterns in a (cultural) medium is implicitly biased by the most efficient methods through which those messages can be encoded and communicated. At a second-order abstraction of logical encoding and communication, the successful transmission of cultural or cognitive information is facilitated (through functional compression) by a qualitative value-systems dimension.
High-ranking Universities may generate more readily-adopted concepts for precisely the same underlying reason that the global information and communications media system is awash with celebrity gossip, sports news and inflammatory ideological rhetoric. The key selection factor for successful pattern self-replication in a transmission medium is the extent to which the information content of that message also (reflexively) supports the propagation of the integrated or gestalt information system represented by the networked transmission medium itself.
Physics and biology developed these solutions billions of years before cultural systems, Universities or strategic academic tenure arrived.
Daedelus Kite 
2 replies on “Information System Reflexivity”
I would think that information, like water and lightning, follows the path of least resistance.
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Yes, certainly, it does. There is a relationship between information and entropy in an energy/thermodynamic sense and in that reference frame information, like fluid or electric current, seeks the lowest energy state.
There is also a global, gestalt or holistic dimension to information systems and at that level different, partially counter-intuitive, considerations and concepts are at work.
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