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The Cybernetics Moment

Name: The Cybernetics Moment
Brand: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9781421424248
Price: 58.99 AUD
Availability: InStock

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9781421424248

Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

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$58.99

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In stock, 2 units

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By Ronald R. Kline
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: December 14, 2017
Format: PAPERBACK
Pages: 352

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Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title

Cyberneticsthe science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humansoriginates 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 narrativean 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 momentwhen cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciencesin setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. War and Information Theory
2. Circular Causality
3. The Cybernetics Craze
4. The Information Bandwagon
5. Humans as Machines
6. Machines as Human
7. Cybernetics in Crisis
8. Inventing an Information Age
9. Two Cybernetic Frontiers
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

""The Cybernetics Moment is an in-depth study of the field of cybernetics. It is also a useful case study of how researchers clarify the questions and boundaries of a field, offering an explanation for the success of information theory and the relative lack of success for cybernetics. Finally, for scholars studying the social implications of computing, algorithms, and automation, this book offers a look at some of the first formulations of those questions and how they were dealt with at the dawn of the information age.""

The Cybernetics Moment

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