Kline, Ronald R. (Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering, Cornell University)

The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age - New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History Kline, Ronald R. (Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering, Cornell University)

Commendation Quotes: "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 historian's attention to detail and contingency and a sociologist's 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."Biographical Note: 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."Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Publisher Marketing: 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 anti-aircraft 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 Citations:

Library Journal 06/15/2015 pg. 107 (EAN 9781421416717, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Kline, Ronald R Ronald R. Kline is a professor of history of technology at Cornell University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.