Cybernetics

Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of “control and communication,” and to indicate its generality, he added “in the animal and machine.” Wiener derived the term cybernetics from the Greek kybernetes, the steersman, who observes deviations from the intended course of the boat and communicates with the rudder to counteract them. Wiener recognized the revolutionary potential of cybernetics for the development of technology and advances in the biological and social sciences. Cybernetics continues to offer a unique vocabulary for the study of communication.

The object of cybernetics has ancient roots. Heron of Alexandria (10–70 CE) was the first chronicler of a peculiar mechanism capable of holding the flame of oil lamps steady. Later, similar mechanisms were found in water clocks. In the 18th century, they reappeared as James Watt's centrifugal governor of steam engines, which drove the industrial era. Since 1910, engineers called them servomechanisms. However, it was Wiener who realized that feedback loops and communication processes formed a unity not heretofore conceptualized.

Cybernetics became established during a series of interdisciplinary meetings held between 1944 and 1953 and known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. They brought together some of the most important postwar intellectuals: Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Erving Goffman, who presented his early sociological ideas there. Cybernetics quickly expanded to embrace neuronal networks (McCulloch), communication patterns in groups (Alex Bavelas), anthropological concerns (Mead), mind (Ashby, Bateson), management (Stafford Beer), political systems (Karl Deutsch), family systems therapy (Bateson, Jay Haley), and of course computation (von Neumann, Shannon).

Cybernetics was too radical to fit traditional academic distinctions and remains an enormously productive interdiscipline that gave birth to numerous specializations—mathematical communication theory, control theory, automata theory, neuronal networks, computer science, artificial intelligence, game theory, information systems, family systems theory, constructivism—and continues to challenge various ontologies (philosophies of being). In the late 1970s, cybernetics took a reflexive turn, recognizing that the known reality cannot be separated from the process by which it is explored, giving rise to second-order cybernetics, fundamental to all sciences.

The use of the prefix cyber- in popular literature about intelligent artifacts, digital media, and globalization of communication—fueling a sense of liberation from authoritarianism, technological determinism, and geographical, even bodily, limitations—attests to how well the fruits of cybernetics are growing in contemporary culture, albeit somewhat shallowly.