Culture in cycles: considering H.T. Odum’s ‘information cycle’

‘Culture’ remains a conundrum in anthropology. When recast in the mold of ‘information cycles,’ culture is transformed. New fault lines appear. Information is splintered into parallel or nested forms. Dynamics becomes cycling. Energy is essential. And culture has function in a directional universe. The ‘information cycle’ is the crowning component of H.T. Odum’s theory of general systems. What follows is an application of the information cycle to the cultural domains of discourse, social media, ritual, education, journalism, technology, academia, and law, which were never attempted by Odum. In information cycles, cultural information is perpetuated – maintained against Second Law depreciation. Conclusions are that culture is in fact a nested hierarchy of cultural forms. Each scale of information production is semi-autonomous, with its own evolutionary dynamics of production and selection in an information cycle. Simultaneously, each information cycle is channeled or entrained by its larger scale of information and ultimately human-ecosystem structuring.