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New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
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Cybernetics--the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans--originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of "information," "feedback," and "control" transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age.
Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative--an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines.
Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment--when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences--in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.
Cybernetics--the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans--originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of "information," "feedback," and "control" transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age.
Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative--an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines.
Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment--when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences--in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.
352 pages, Paperback
First published June 5, 2015
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About the author
Ronald R. Kline
7 books4 followersRonald R. Kline is Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay, Jr. Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering Emeritus and Graduate School Professor at Cornell University.
Professor Kline's current research areas are the history of cybernetics and digitalization. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of engineering, industrial research, technology in rural life, and information science and technology, as well as engineering ethics. The author of three books - Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (1992), Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social change in Rural America (2000), and The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why we Call Our Age the Information Age (2015), all published by Johns Hopkins University Press - Professor Kline is now writing a book on the history of digitalization in the Cold War.
He is past president of the Society for the History of Technology and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology, former chief editor of IEEE's Technology & Society Magazine, former advisory editor for Technology and Culture, Isis, and Engineering Studies, and is currently an advisory editor for Social Studies of Science. Before his retirement in 2020, he founded and directed the Bovay Program in History and Engineering Ethics in the College of Engineering and taught undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of science and technology and the history of information technology.
Professor Kline's current research areas are the history of cybernetics and digitalization. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of engineering, industrial research, technology in rural life, and information science and technology, as well as engineering ethics. The author of three books - Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (1992), Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social change in Rural America (2000), and The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why we Call Our Age the Information Age (2015), all published by Johns Hopkins University Press - Professor Kline is now writing a book on the history of digitalization in the Cold War.
He is past president of the Society for the History of Technology and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology, former chief editor of IEEE's Technology & Society Magazine, former advisory editor for Technology and Culture, Isis, and Engineering Studies, and is currently an advisory editor for Social Studies of Science. Before his retirement in 2020, he founded and directed the Bovay Program in History and Engineering Ethics in the College of Engineering and taught undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of science and technology and the history of information technology.
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November 9, 2020
This review was supposed to go up on H-Net, but has been mired in limbo for several months. Since their reviews are covered under Creative Commons, and I'm the author, and I prefer Goodreads, I'm posting here. Expect more words than usual.
It is cliché to say that the current era is an information age. The objects, processes, and consequences of digital computing are omnipresent, built into everything from toys to weapons to domestic appliances. While the prefix cyber- signifies this vision of digital modernity, the field of cybernetics is a marginalized fringe, rather than a mainstream science of information. Ronald R. Kline traces the intellectual and social trajectories of cybernetics and information from their linked origins in 1948 to the present. Two geniuses of applied mathematics, Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, formalized an insight that information could be mathematically described in a form like the entropy equation, a standard measure of disorder in a physical system that related to the thermodynamic capacity for work. Moreover, human being and machines could be described as interacting components of a larger system with emergent characteristics not merely capturable in the performance of machines or the decisions of men. From this insight, Weiner, Shannon, and luminaries in the biological, psychological, and social sciences hoped that a new interdisciplinary language would arise uniting multiple fields of study and providing a scientifically rigorous description of the contours of Second World War II life. But cybernetics never rose above the status of analogy for a range of scientific phenomena and faded as a field. Through a detailed reading of the personal correspondence of involved scholars, proceedings of interdisciplinary conferences, and the popular press, Kline provides an invaluable account of how scientists and humanists came to understand the potential and pitfalls of increasing interconnectedness between humans and machines and the polymorphic meaning of the word “information.”
Arguments over the true father of information are a feature of histories celebrating both Weiner and Shannon. The first chapter works around this priority dispute by describing the near-simultaneous origins of Weiner’s and Shannon’s ideas from their World War II work, and contacts among a common circle of collaborators. Weiner developed an automated anti-aircraft sight at the MIT Radiation Laboratory that could calculate lead and direct the gun to ensure a hit as a human operator tracked a target. For Weiner, information was represented by a time-series of measurements, and as those messages became more random less information was transmitted. Imagine an oscillating dial settling on a value, and one captures the essence of Weiner's thinking on information and entropy. Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics was an extension of the insight that men and machines could be described in terms of information and feedback loops. Shannon’s work, also published in 1948 in a two-part article “A Mathematical Theory of Information”, described information as positive entropy: as the receiver becomes more certain of what to expect next from a transmitted signal, the less information they receive. Though the underlying mathematics were similar, two theories of information were inverses of each other. For Weiner a steady signal transmitted maximum confidence and maximum information; for Shannon, a steady signal sent nothing new, and transmitted zero information. Though Weiner has been largely written out of the official history of information theory, Kline notes that Shannon visited Weiner several times at MIT in 1941 and 1942 and, according to Weiner’s collaborator Julian Bigelow, they discussed the statistical basis of information. Combined with Shannon’s acknowledgment to Weiner in his article, this suggests a greater degree of similar thinking between the two men than the later divergence between cybernetics and information theory indicates.
The second chapter follows ten interdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953 on cybernetics. The premise of cybernetics was that “the nervous system was deemed to work like a feedback-control mechanism, the brain like a digital computer, and society like a communication system” (pg. 45). Behind these analogies was the idea of negative feedback, a system which maintains a set level by correcting deviations from its outputs. Thermostats are a familiar use of negative feedback, a device which turns on a furnace when a room is cold, and turns off the furnace when the room reaches a comfortable temperature. The Macy conference attendees hoped that complex behavior such as biological and social phenomena, could be treated scientifically by cybernetic models. Despite significant support over seven years from the Macy Foundation, the conferences failed to develop their analogies and ideas into a research program. Data from the social sciences was too messy to fit into cybernetics equations and models, and personal feud between Weiner and conference chair Warren McCulloch over laboratory support at MIT interfered with the intellectual project.
While the scientific side of cybernetics floundered, the ideas gained increasing relevance in the public sphere. The third chapter explores an explosion of cultural interests in cybernetics in the early Cold War. Weiner’s book Cybernetics became a campus favorite and attracted glowing reviews from the press. Weiner’s 1950 book The Human Uses of Human Beings, a non-mathematic treatment of his theories, attracted further popular attention to the potential of "thinking" machines. The course of cybernetics quickly ran away from Weiner, as his books were advertised alongside science-fiction novels like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Weiner’s name was even appropriated without permission by L. Ron Hubbard to promote the pseudo-scientific cult Dianetics, a precursor to Scientology. What scientific progress there was in the cybernetics was by applied military projects for guided missiles and radar systems, rather than the interdisciplinary vision of the Macy conferences. Weiner was leery of military domination of science, even as he was taking military funding for his work on a glove that translated sound into vibration for the deaf, and publicly distanced himself from military work in a letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While cybernetics became strongly associated with thinking computers and automated factories in the public eye, for academics it remained a diffuse program of mathematical models in the social and biological sciences which had not yet produced novel results or integrated disciplines across the social and natural science.
The contrast between cybernetics and information theory in the years after 1955, as presented in the fourth chapter, became even more stark., Kline’s analysis of the papers and conferences organized under the aegis of the Institute of Radio Engineers Professional Group on Information Theory (PGIT) shows that this group cited Shannon’s definition of information over Weiner’s. Although the first PGIT conferences were highly interdisciplinary, featuring papers on automata and the social sciences along with communication engineering, by 1959 their focus had narrowed to the emerging technology of digital computers and the technical details of analog signal processing as applied to radar and telephones. By the 1960s, scholars cited either Weiner or Shannon, but rarely both. The academic community split between cyberneticists pronouncing sweeping theories, and information theorists working on discrete technical problems. Participants in the information theory conferences eventually separated their work entirely from the ordinary semantic definition of "information" as conveyed meaning to focus on analog signal processing and the storage and manipulation of digital data.
The fifth chapter and sixth chapter return to cybernetics as science, by examining the influence of cybernetics in the origins of artificial intelligence and the work of six behavioral scientists from 1954 to 1959: Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, Roman Jakobson, Talcott Parsons, and Gregory Bateson. These researchers used concepts from cybernetics and information theory to mathematically model human behavior and social interactions. Information theory had applications in psychology and linguistics, measuring the thresholds of humans to distinguish phonemes, the basic unit of speech, in a noisy environment. Miller’s adage that human working memory consists of seven items, plus or minus two (now a commonplace observation linked to the length of telephone numbers) has its origins in this research. Although cybernetic thinking influenced research agendas and the formation of new interdisciplinary centers, its outcomes were distinct from the visions of a universal science that had surrounded the movement in the early 1950s.
No discussion of cybernetics is not complete without its avatar, the cyborg. Kline analyzes the 1960 articles of Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, a pair of doctors working in aerospace medicine, who coined the term cyborg to describe their ideal astronaut, a symbiont of human intelligence and machine durability capable of operating in the vacuum of outer space. The original cyborg, a cybernetic organism that could consciously adapt to its environments, has since come to mean any implantation of mechanical or electrical components in a living organism. For Clynes and Kline, the cyborg went beyond a solution to the immediate problem of space exploration to mark a spiritual leap in mankind’s self-directed evolution. For reasons of practicality, the Air Force rejected the cyborg in favor of life support capsules, but the idea lives on. Through science-fiction fantasies and Donna Haraway’s ironic criticism of the military-industrial complex, the cyborg has become an evocative symbol, standing for both inhuman perfectibility and the indivisible tangle of social and technological systems in ordinary life.
The seventh chapter follows cybernetics through its decline in the 1960s and 1970s. The biologists and social scientists that had given the initial series of Macy conferences on cybernetics their deeply interdisciplinary character returned to their original fields, and cybernetics was abandoned to researchers in computers and electronics with heterodox inclinations. Cybernetics found a home in the Soviet Union, where feedback-control mechanisms had a natural alliance with the Communist command economy. Out of concerns of a ‘cybernetics gap’, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored the founding of the American Society for Cybernetics in 1964, the year of Nobert Weiner’s death. The organizers of the ASC and a separate Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Group for Systems Science and Cybernetics attempted to recast cybernetics as a modern science capable of solving social problems but had little success in the tumultuous late 60s. The dreamers and visionaries of the counterculture actively co-opted the terminology of cybernetics, embarking on a legitimacy exchange that gave a gloss of respectability to their vision of a liberated technological utopia, while leaving the scientific project of cybernetics disordered and discredited.
Chapter eight returns to the meanings of information beyond the technical non-semantic definition arrived at by the information theorists, the relationship between information in and of itself, information technology, and the information age. The term information technology originated in the management jargon of the 1960s, and evolved from referring to statistical techniques for managing business processes such as operations research, to referring to a slew of new devices for storing, communicating, and analyzing digitized data. Information technology gained credence as an ever-expanding budget item, another necessary expense for managers looking to root out inefficiency and coordinate global businesses. The term information age has a separate genealogy, one rooted in futurism and critique published in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan. This rhetoric of radical transformation was picked up by government economists in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other advanced countries, but in the absence of agreed upon definition of information in a social sense, the idea of an information age become an empty label to denote recent decades, without capturing the magnitude or consequences of the immense investment in information technology.
The Cybernetics Moment closes by reading Stewart Brand’s journalism on cybernetics and computers as how a case study in how an influential believer in the liberatory potential of Weiner's cybernetics became an information age guru. Brand wrote about the birth of the ARPANET in Rolling Stone as “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums” (1972) and interviewed Margeret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1976 about their time at the Macy conferences on cybernetics. Brand was perhaps the last person to attempt to organize a social movement around cybernetic principles with his Whole Earth Movement. But Bateson's death and the rise of the commercial possibilities associated with the personal computer lead Brand to instead evangelize the liberating power of information at the MIT Media Lab. Despite the failure of cybernetics to provide answers or even progress on its major premises, the questions raised then remain provocative even today: that something about ourselves can be seen in devices that adjust to their surroundings; that information is a fundamental part of the universe on par with energy and matter; and that there might be a spiritual component to computers.
The Cybernetics Moment is an in-depth study of the field of cybernetics. It is historical account of how researchers clarify the questions and boundaries of a field which offers an explanation for the success of information theory and the relative lack of success for cybernetics in terms of legitimacy exchange. Finally, for scholars studying the social implications of computing, algorithms, and automation, this is a thorough review of the first formulations of those questions and how they were dealt with at the dawn of the information age.
It is cliché to say that the current era is an information age. The objects, processes, and consequences of digital computing are omnipresent, built into everything from toys to weapons to domestic appliances. While the prefix cyber- signifies this vision of digital modernity, the field of cybernetics is a marginalized fringe, rather than a mainstream science of information. Ronald R. Kline traces the intellectual and social trajectories of cybernetics and information from their linked origins in 1948 to the present. Two geniuses of applied mathematics, Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, formalized an insight that information could be mathematically described in a form like the entropy equation, a standard measure of disorder in a physical system that related to the thermodynamic capacity for work. Moreover, human being and machines could be described as interacting components of a larger system with emergent characteristics not merely capturable in the performance of machines or the decisions of men. From this insight, Weiner, Shannon, and luminaries in the biological, psychological, and social sciences hoped that a new interdisciplinary language would arise uniting multiple fields of study and providing a scientifically rigorous description of the contours of Second World War II life. But cybernetics never rose above the status of analogy for a range of scientific phenomena and faded as a field. Through a detailed reading of the personal correspondence of involved scholars, proceedings of interdisciplinary conferences, and the popular press, Kline provides an invaluable account of how scientists and humanists came to understand the potential and pitfalls of increasing interconnectedness between humans and machines and the polymorphic meaning of the word “information.”
Arguments over the true father of information are a feature of histories celebrating both Weiner and Shannon. The first chapter works around this priority dispute by describing the near-simultaneous origins of Weiner’s and Shannon’s ideas from their World War II work, and contacts among a common circle of collaborators. Weiner developed an automated anti-aircraft sight at the MIT Radiation Laboratory that could calculate lead and direct the gun to ensure a hit as a human operator tracked a target. For Weiner, information was represented by a time-series of measurements, and as those messages became more random less information was transmitted. Imagine an oscillating dial settling on a value, and one captures the essence of Weiner's thinking on information and entropy. Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics was an extension of the insight that men and machines could be described in terms of information and feedback loops. Shannon’s work, also published in 1948 in a two-part article “A Mathematical Theory of Information”, described information as positive entropy: as the receiver becomes more certain of what to expect next from a transmitted signal, the less information they receive. Though the underlying mathematics were similar, two theories of information were inverses of each other. For Weiner a steady signal transmitted maximum confidence and maximum information; for Shannon, a steady signal sent nothing new, and transmitted zero information. Though Weiner has been largely written out of the official history of information theory, Kline notes that Shannon visited Weiner several times at MIT in 1941 and 1942 and, according to Weiner’s collaborator Julian Bigelow, they discussed the statistical basis of information. Combined with Shannon’s acknowledgment to Weiner in his article, this suggests a greater degree of similar thinking between the two men than the later divergence between cybernetics and information theory indicates.
The second chapter follows ten interdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953 on cybernetics. The premise of cybernetics was that “the nervous system was deemed to work like a feedback-control mechanism, the brain like a digital computer, and society like a communication system” (pg. 45). Behind these analogies was the idea of negative feedback, a system which maintains a set level by correcting deviations from its outputs. Thermostats are a familiar use of negative feedback, a device which turns on a furnace when a room is cold, and turns off the furnace when the room reaches a comfortable temperature. The Macy conference attendees hoped that complex behavior such as biological and social phenomena, could be treated scientifically by cybernetic models. Despite significant support over seven years from the Macy Foundation, the conferences failed to develop their analogies and ideas into a research program. Data from the social sciences was too messy to fit into cybernetics equations and models, and personal feud between Weiner and conference chair Warren McCulloch over laboratory support at MIT interfered with the intellectual project.
While the scientific side of cybernetics floundered, the ideas gained increasing relevance in the public sphere. The third chapter explores an explosion of cultural interests in cybernetics in the early Cold War. Weiner’s book Cybernetics became a campus favorite and attracted glowing reviews from the press. Weiner’s 1950 book The Human Uses of Human Beings, a non-mathematic treatment of his theories, attracted further popular attention to the potential of "thinking" machines. The course of cybernetics quickly ran away from Weiner, as his books were advertised alongside science-fiction novels like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Weiner’s name was even appropriated without permission by L. Ron Hubbard to promote the pseudo-scientific cult Dianetics, a precursor to Scientology. What scientific progress there was in the cybernetics was by applied military projects for guided missiles and radar systems, rather than the interdisciplinary vision of the Macy conferences. Weiner was leery of military domination of science, even as he was taking military funding for his work on a glove that translated sound into vibration for the deaf, and publicly distanced himself from military work in a letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While cybernetics became strongly associated with thinking computers and automated factories in the public eye, for academics it remained a diffuse program of mathematical models in the social and biological sciences which had not yet produced novel results or integrated disciplines across the social and natural science.
The contrast between cybernetics and information theory in the years after 1955, as presented in the fourth chapter, became even more stark., Kline’s analysis of the papers and conferences organized under the aegis of the Institute of Radio Engineers Professional Group on Information Theory (PGIT) shows that this group cited Shannon’s definition of information over Weiner’s. Although the first PGIT conferences were highly interdisciplinary, featuring papers on automata and the social sciences along with communication engineering, by 1959 their focus had narrowed to the emerging technology of digital computers and the technical details of analog signal processing as applied to radar and telephones. By the 1960s, scholars cited either Weiner or Shannon, but rarely both. The academic community split between cyberneticists pronouncing sweeping theories, and information theorists working on discrete technical problems. Participants in the information theory conferences eventually separated their work entirely from the ordinary semantic definition of "information" as conveyed meaning to focus on analog signal processing and the storage and manipulation of digital data.
The fifth chapter and sixth chapter return to cybernetics as science, by examining the influence of cybernetics in the origins of artificial intelligence and the work of six behavioral scientists from 1954 to 1959: Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, Roman Jakobson, Talcott Parsons, and Gregory Bateson. These researchers used concepts from cybernetics and information theory to mathematically model human behavior and social interactions. Information theory had applications in psychology and linguistics, measuring the thresholds of humans to distinguish phonemes, the basic unit of speech, in a noisy environment. Miller’s adage that human working memory consists of seven items, plus or minus two (now a commonplace observation linked to the length of telephone numbers) has its origins in this research. Although cybernetic thinking influenced research agendas and the formation of new interdisciplinary centers, its outcomes were distinct from the visions of a universal science that had surrounded the movement in the early 1950s.
No discussion of cybernetics is not complete without its avatar, the cyborg. Kline analyzes the 1960 articles of Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, a pair of doctors working in aerospace medicine, who coined the term cyborg to describe their ideal astronaut, a symbiont of human intelligence and machine durability capable of operating in the vacuum of outer space. The original cyborg, a cybernetic organism that could consciously adapt to its environments, has since come to mean any implantation of mechanical or electrical components in a living organism. For Clynes and Kline, the cyborg went beyond a solution to the immediate problem of space exploration to mark a spiritual leap in mankind’s self-directed evolution. For reasons of practicality, the Air Force rejected the cyborg in favor of life support capsules, but the idea lives on. Through science-fiction fantasies and Donna Haraway’s ironic criticism of the military-industrial complex, the cyborg has become an evocative symbol, standing for both inhuman perfectibility and the indivisible tangle of social and technological systems in ordinary life.
The seventh chapter follows cybernetics through its decline in the 1960s and 1970s. The biologists and social scientists that had given the initial series of Macy conferences on cybernetics their deeply interdisciplinary character returned to their original fields, and cybernetics was abandoned to researchers in computers and electronics with heterodox inclinations. Cybernetics found a home in the Soviet Union, where feedback-control mechanisms had a natural alliance with the Communist command economy. Out of concerns of a ‘cybernetics gap’, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored the founding of the American Society for Cybernetics in 1964, the year of Nobert Weiner’s death. The organizers of the ASC and a separate Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Group for Systems Science and Cybernetics attempted to recast cybernetics as a modern science capable of solving social problems but had little success in the tumultuous late 60s. The dreamers and visionaries of the counterculture actively co-opted the terminology of cybernetics, embarking on a legitimacy exchange that gave a gloss of respectability to their vision of a liberated technological utopia, while leaving the scientific project of cybernetics disordered and discredited.
Chapter eight returns to the meanings of information beyond the technical non-semantic definition arrived at by the information theorists, the relationship between information in and of itself, information technology, and the information age. The term information technology originated in the management jargon of the 1960s, and evolved from referring to statistical techniques for managing business processes such as operations research, to referring to a slew of new devices for storing, communicating, and analyzing digitized data. Information technology gained credence as an ever-expanding budget item, another necessary expense for managers looking to root out inefficiency and coordinate global businesses. The term information age has a separate genealogy, one rooted in futurism and critique published in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan. This rhetoric of radical transformation was picked up by government economists in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other advanced countries, but in the absence of agreed upon definition of information in a social sense, the idea of an information age become an empty label to denote recent decades, without capturing the magnitude or consequences of the immense investment in information technology.
The Cybernetics Moment closes by reading Stewart Brand’s journalism on cybernetics and computers as how a case study in how an influential believer in the liberatory potential of Weiner's cybernetics became an information age guru. Brand wrote about the birth of the ARPANET in Rolling Stone as “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums” (1972) and interviewed Margeret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1976 about their time at the Macy conferences on cybernetics. Brand was perhaps the last person to attempt to organize a social movement around cybernetic principles with his Whole Earth Movement. But Bateson's death and the rise of the commercial possibilities associated with the personal computer lead Brand to instead evangelize the liberating power of information at the MIT Media Lab. Despite the failure of cybernetics to provide answers or even progress on its major premises, the questions raised then remain provocative even today: that something about ourselves can be seen in devices that adjust to their surroundings; that information is a fundamental part of the universe on par with energy and matter; and that there might be a spiritual component to computers.
The Cybernetics Moment is an in-depth study of the field of cybernetics. It is historical account of how researchers clarify the questions and boundaries of a field which offers an explanation for the success of information theory and the relative lack of success for cybernetics in terms of legitimacy exchange. Finally, for scholars studying the social implications of computing, algorithms, and automation, this is a thorough review of the first formulations of those questions and how they were dealt with at the dawn of the information age.
February 17, 2022
This book focuses on the history of the concept of Cybernetics in academic research and its reception in popular culture. It also looks at the development and reception of information theory both as proposed by Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon. While focused on academic debates and research ideas it does not go into technical detail about the concepts or techniques. Rather it traces debates, personalities, conferences, journals, academic careers and funding. It is an interesting perspective on ideas that have become obscured by later developments, but a bit dense.
The focus of the narrative is on developments in American researchers especially those who originally interacted with Norbert Wiener like participants of the Macy conference. The book tries to disentangle some of the threads such as the origins of Wiener and Shannon's formulation of quantity of information as having the same form as entropy (logarithm of the number of states) but with opposite signs. Often though such issues remain obscure. The book also emphasizes how ideas like the cyborg originated in academic research and then took on dramatically different forms in other research or popular culture.
The book feels a little unedited n places. The same historical actors may pop up multiple times and the same facts are rehearsed as if for the first time. The repetition is natural but could probably have been made to feel more comfortable with a little more attention. The lack of technical detail can make some of the discussion a bit obscure, but often technical issues like the lack of consensus about the definition of analogue computers at early Macy conferences are well covered.
The e-book worked fine on my Kobo e-reader except that the last endnote in each chapter would not preview instead when I clicked on it in my e-reader jumped to the endnote with no preview.
The focus of the narrative is on developments in American researchers especially those who originally interacted with Norbert Wiener like participants of the Macy conference. The book tries to disentangle some of the threads such as the origins of Wiener and Shannon's formulation of quantity of information as having the same form as entropy (logarithm of the number of states) but with opposite signs. Often though such issues remain obscure. The book also emphasizes how ideas like the cyborg originated in academic research and then took on dramatically different forms in other research or popular culture.
The book feels a little unedited n places. The same historical actors may pop up multiple times and the same facts are rehearsed as if for the first time. The repetition is natural but could probably have been made to feel more comfortable with a little more attention. The lack of technical detail can make some of the discussion a bit obscure, but often technical issues like the lack of consensus about the definition of analogue computers at early Macy conferences are well covered.
The e-book worked fine on my Kobo e-reader except that the last endnote in each chapter would not preview instead when I clicked on it in my e-reader jumped to the endnote with no preview.
February 21, 2018
It's a good book if you're interested in that sort of thing. I had to read it for class and found it mostly boring and/or confusing. It's history, so it isn't necessarily confusing with the ideas that it explains (though sometimes it is, and you get the feeling people are really overcomplicating some of the ideas they were coming up with), but in the people and places and institutions, etc. that it references that I don't really know and can't remember because I'm terrible with names. Overall, I'm not entirely sure exactly what I would have wanted changed to make it less confusing (I had a fine time reading history books for my French Revolution and Ottoman Empire classes last semester). It might have been difficult for me because I just wasn't that interested.
November 30, 2020
Too much overlap with Pickering, Galison, Edwards, etc. There're some interesting insights about early bionics & cyborgs, but the book never fully develop its argument.
February 8, 2018
Informative history of several key figures in the cybernetics and early information boom. This book doesn’t attempt to address whose voices were not heard in these movements, nor does it say much about the implications for today. A bit dry, but useful.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews