Selfies: Cultural Diversity, Regional Variation and Recursive Abstraction

Context: Visualising Facebook

I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, culture and technologically-mediated self-identity.

However, the gradient of difference across and between places is not purely a consequence of drift and idiomatic, stylistic or cultural speciation. The Global, gestalt or holistic system optimally self-propagates both through and as a diverse transmission medium, fundamentally shaped by this difference and enduring discontinuity. It invokes difference and change as a function of entropy and autopoiesis.

As a manifestation of “emergence” and optimally-concise encoding of system self-representation, each instance of speciation is also a microcosm of autonomous Global self-propagation. System self-containment (and complexity “bootstrapping”) requires this part/whole symmetry and where regional difference encodes speciation, it logically abstracts the recursive process of recursive replication itself.