Tom Abel, Tzu Chi University

Over two years and a deep dive into Odum’s writings on the topic of ‘information’, I have written three papers, coming at the topic from different directions.  I wish to share what I have learned with the emergy community.  The first paper is a review of Odum’s theoretical position on information, what it is, and what it does.  That paper then connects Odum’s information and his Fifth Law Hierarchy Principle to my continuing development of a hierarchy of cultural information forms.  The second paper looks exclusively at Odum’s application of emergy to information.  It reviews all of Odum’s information emergy studies to extract a number of evaluation principles that he developed over time.  It then applies those principles in a new emergy analysis of one of the scales of cultural information production, duplicating several of the approaches that Odum established.  The third paper is addressed to exploring Odum’s ‘structural life cycles’ approach to the information cycle, an approach that I now feel is superior to his first efforts in 1996.  That method is demonstrated with Odum’s analysis of Texas Highways.  In total, this talk should give you an ‘Odum overview’ of an extremely important topic in the world, the production and reproduction of information.  Today, we know these information forms as social media, scientific research, movies, games, sacred texts, money, military tactics and technologies, laws, and others, each that ‘feeds-back control’ to shape all of our lives.