How did cybernetics and information theory arise, and how did they
come to dominate fields as diverse as engineering, biology, and the
social sciences?
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice
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.
