The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

📖 Peter Sachs Collopy, The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, book review, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 41 (2019), 67–70.

The historical literature on cybernetics has ballooned in the last 15 years, as scholars have sought to understand how scientists and engineers studying “control and communication in the animal and the machine” (as Norbert Weiner subtitled his book Cybernetics) contributed to Soviet and Chilean computer networks, assistive technologies for the deaf, theories of schizophrenia, and experimental music and cinema, to name just a few of their projects. This range of topics raises anew the question—central to historians’ accounts since the early 1990s—of what exactly cybernetics was. As the first book to integrate the many dimensions of cybernetics into a single narrative, The Cybernetics Moment presents a new answer to this crucial question.

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Subjects: computing, cybernetics, engineering, media, science, technology
Category: writing