-Cybernetics flourished in the academy from 1940-1970 but then spilled out to become both everywhere and nowhere.
-Gordon Pask’s definition of cybernetics: the field concerned with information flows in all media.
There are three orders of cybernetics which correspond to certain years, but we are moving into a fourth.
1st order Cybernetics 1943-1960
- Cybernetics came to be when the idea of the feedback loop was joined with a modern concept of information in the 20th century. The Feedback loop is the process by which information from the past or present influences the same phenomenon in the present of future.
- Two key papers published in 1943 “Behavior, Purpose, Technology” by Roseunbluth Wiener and Bigelow and “A Logical Calculation of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” by McCulloch and Pitts.
- Envisioned as a framework that would cover both biological and mechanical systems.
- The Macy Conferences occurred between 43-52 and focused on the legitamacy of machine-animal-human comparisons. Basic mechanical models of animals were used to draw comparisons with more complex human and animal systems.Electric Rat, Moth, Tortoise.
- ”Logical” paper proved a theorem about a neuron model to make a proposition that could be proved universal by a turing machine. Which was basically a model that could simulate the logic of a computer algorithim.
- That neurons could perform computational acts was justification for both machines and humans being cybernetic.
- Information theory of Shannon and Wiener was to decontextualize information, which took away meaning. This allowed information to be seen as a flow that could move between different embodiments and substrates.
- Lead to idea that the brain could be uploaded.
- McKay argued that context and embodiment were important. Model lost out because it was unable to be quantified at this stage.
- Contradiction of cybernetics between need for simple model for quantification and a more complete, harder to quantify model, which was richer and fuller.
- Organism/mechanism separate from environment.
2nd order Cybernetics 1960-1985
- Introduced observer as a part of the system. Book Observing Systems lol. von Foerster.
- Autopoetic Theory: Takes account of the observer in a negative way, distinguishing between what an observer can perceive and what the system produces for itself. Events outside the system can produce events inside but no information passes from environment to system. It reconnected meaning but only reflexively.
3rd Order Cybernetics 1985-??
- A virtuality.
- Media transmit, store, process information. Human and animal bodies are media. The construction of the body as informational medium takes the form of bodies closely tied with other media. The web. Smartphones.
- This doesn’t look like far off cyberspace of a constructed and limited virtual plane. Virtual information is placed over physical locations and objects. Virtuality and actuality create mixed reality through their fluid mixing and seamless transitions.
- Sterling proposes neologism “Spime” Virtual/actual entities that can be traced through space and time. Shifts from object as primary reality, to data in computational environments. The spime is “a set of relations first and always, and an object every now and then.”
- Completes Pasks definition as flows in all environments become important.
- also tries to take into account how observer is constructed socio-linguistically,
- Limit of autopoetic systems as complex systems are capable of evolving.
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Cybernetics reconfigures boundaries.
-1st order changed boundary between biological and machine, placed observer outside.
-2nd Placed observer into system.
-3rd Located both within complex environments through which information and data are flowing.
Fredkin claims that the universe is a giant computer
-creates reality through computational processes that at it embodies and is.
-Shift from flows to computational processes. Meaning of information only comes from processes that interpret it. Information is processual and contextual.
-Mechanisms of interpretation give context. From binary to C++ to screen to brain.
-This allows for a reintroduction of Mackays theory of information. Meaning must include “full basic symbol complex.”
-Interpretation no longer occurs only in consciousness. Becomes a multi-layered distributed activity of finding relation between local and context specific inputs and outputs.
-Breaking apart interpretation allows for partly quantifiable data.
-Sees local contexts not just as contributing to conscious thoughts but as acts of interpreting and meaning themselves. (neural responses, fatigue rates, voltage, etc.)
Then the question of what cybernetics can offer media studies comes up. Media is defined through four principles of analysis: technology, semiotics, social contexts, materiality.
-Three contributions of cybernetics to media studies
-Feedback loop joined with quantitative information flows (social contexts).
-Framework for analyzing control and communication in animals, humans, and machines (semiotics)
-Artifacts to institute these ideas. (material and technology)
In computational media cybernetics and media cocreate each other. Technologies of today place computation as the language of nature, not math.
-Complex, adaptive systems cannot be modeled by equations, but only simulations.
-Recursive feedback loops everywhere.
-Asks if computers aren’t the most ‘natural’ thing of all.
Computational media and humans coevolve to constitute one another in the technogenesis. Where this is going is in debate.
-Transhumanists like Kurzwell and Moravec.
-Brooks says it will be long, or maybe not possible to singularity.
-Fukuyama wants to police the borders between body and cybernetic technology.
Hayle argues that the singularity hypothesis downplays the enormous difference between humans and computers. Technogenesis has always been a force shaping humanity.
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