Social Structuration Online: Entropy and Social Systems

One of the most important goals of the present volume is to define and relate group structuration to other online organizational and interactional phenomena. Although structuration is a high-level concept that may hold different meanings for different people, within this research, the concept is quite simple and clear. In brief, structuration is equated with the concept of “signal” in information systems, as defined by Shannon and Weaver (1948). Structuration is meaningful order, so by Shannon’s logic, structure is the opposite of entropy. Since structure is measured using entropy, we may say that structure increases as the observed value of entropy decreases. Conceptually, this means that structure is captured in the negative by observing the degree to which the system is not random (noisy or disordered).