The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age by Ronald R.

Description: The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald R. Kline 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description 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. Back Cover Choice Outstanding Academic Title 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. "Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now... Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics."-- Information & Culture "[A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics... This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about."-- Choice "As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists."-- Cybernetics and System Analysis "Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics... Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations."-- IEEE History Center "The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America."-- Journal of American History "The book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology."-- IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "Ronald Klines chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there--to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar."-- Second-Order Cybernetics "Klines The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date."-- Los Angeles Review of Books Flap Choice Outstanding Academic Title 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. "Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now . . . Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics."-- Information & Culture "[A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics . . . This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about."-- Choice "As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists."-- Cybernetics and System Analysis "Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics . . . Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations."-- IEEE History Center "The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America."-- Journal of American History "The book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology."-- IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "Ronald Klines chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there--to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar."-- Second-Order Cybernetics "Klines The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date."-- Los Angeles Review of Books Author Biography Ronald R. Kline is the Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University. He is the author of Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist and Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. Table of Contents AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. War and Information Theory2. Circular Causality3. The Cybernetics Craze4. The Information Bandwagon5. Humans as Machines6. Machines as Human7. Cybernetics in Crisis8. Inventing an Information Age9. Two Cybernetic FrontiersAbbreviationsNotesIndex Review Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now... Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics. Information & Culture [A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics... This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about. Choice As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists. Cybernetics and System Anaysis Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics... Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations. IEEE History Center The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America. Journal of American History The book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Ronald Klines chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there-to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar. Second-Order Cybernetics Klines The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date. Los Angeles Review of Books Kline does a valuable service tracing the contrasting fates of cybernetics and information theory. Annals of Science ... The knowledge offered in The Cybernetics Moment will greatly contribute to any reader seeking an enhanced or more comprehensive understanding of our present-day discourse surrounding information, while also providing a detailed and well-warranted history of the science of cybernetics. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship After reading his book, it is impossible to ignore the contribution that cybernetics has made to computational models and techniques used in numerous academic disciplines, and to how so many of these disciplines- from biology and engineering to social sciences and the humanities-operated even in quantitative and social history. With The Cybernetics Moment, Kline has moved cybernetics out of the shadows of intellectual history into the limelight. The American Historical Review Promotional The Cybernetics Moment relies on a deep and thorough mining of primary historical sources, coupled with a broad and contextual review of the secondary historical literature and an appropriate level of attention to related popular culture narratives. With both a historians attention to detail and contingency and a sociologists understanding of discourse and meaning, Kline demonstrates in this rich story that there is more than we thought behind the decades-long adoption of computational models, techniques, and visions by the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. -- Gregory J. Downey, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television Prizes Winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2015 (United States) Long Description Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title 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. Review Text "" 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."" Review Quote "... valuable addition to the history of cybernetics..." Promotional "Headline" How did cybernetics and information theory arise, and how did they come to dominate fields as diverse as engineering, biology, and the social sciences? Details ISBN142142424X Author Ronald R. Kline Pages 352 Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press Year 2017 ISBN-10 142142424X ISBN-13 9781421424248 Format Paperback Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press Subtitle Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age Place of Publication Baltimore, MD Country of Publication United States DEWEY 003.509 Illustrations 4 Line drawings, black and white; 6 Halftones, black and white Affiliation Cornell University Position Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering Media Book Short Title The Cybernetics Moment Language English NZ Release Date 2017-12-11 US Release Date 2017-12-11 Publication Date 2017-12-11 UK Release Date 2017-12-11 Series New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History Alternative 9781421416717 Audience Professional & Vocational AU Release Date 2017-10-14 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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