Cybernetics

Relationship to Systemics

Cybernetics has become a significant theoretical term in global studies, particularly with the growth of cognate terms derived from the root cyber as a synonym for virtual and emblematic of the global, such as cyberspace, cyberculture, and cyberpunk. Related to systemics and systems philosophy, the term has functioned as an approach for investigating a wide range of phenomena in information and communication theory, computer science and computer-based design environments, artificial intelligence, management, education, child-based psychology, human systems and consciousness studies, cognitive engineering and knowledge-based systems, “sociocybernetics” (i.e., sociology based on general systems theory), human development, emergence and self-regulation, ecosystems, sustainable development, database and expert systems, health and medicine, musical and theater performance, musicology, peace studies, multi media, hypermedia and hypertext, collaborative decision-support systems, World Wide Web studies, cultural diversity, neural nets, software engineering, vision systems, global community, individual freedom and responsibility, urban revitalization, environmental design, as well as personal and spiritual development.

Governing as a major root meaning has been picked up in all major definitions, including by A. M. Ampere, a French scientist, who used it to refer to the science of government; W. Ross Ashby, who talked of the “art of steermanship”; and Stafford Beer, who talked of the science of effective organization. Other modern pioneers in the field tended to emphasize a more technical aspect of the study of systems: “systems open to energy but closed to information” (Ashby); “problems of control, recursiveness, and information” (Gregory Bateson); “feedback as purposeful behaviour in man-machines and living organisms” (Ludwig von Bertalanffy); “the deep nature of control” (Beer); “relationship between endogenous goals and the external environment” (Peter Corning); “circularity” (Heinz von Förster); “the theory of interconnectedness of possible dynamic self-regulated systems” (G. Klaus); “the art and science of human understanding” (Umberto Maturana); and “the study of justified intervention” (James Wilk). Where one tradition emphasizes circular causality in the design of computers and automata and finds its intellectual expression in theories of computation, regulation, and control, another tradition, which emerged from human and social concerns, emphasizes epistemology—how we come to know—and explores theories of self-reference to understand such phenomena as autonomy, identity, and purpose.

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