The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

351 Pages·2015·2.94 MB·English

by  Kline

The Cybernetics Moment
New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
Jeffrey Sklansky, Series Editor
The Cybernetics Moment
Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
RONALD R. KLINE
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2015
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kline, Ronald R., author.
The cybernetics moment: or why we call our age the information age / Ronald R. Kline.
pages cm. — (New studies in American intellectual and cultural history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1671-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1671-9
(hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1672-4 (electronic) — ISBN
1-4214-1672-7 (electronic) 1. Information theory. 2. Cybernetics—Social aspects. I. Title.
II. Title: Cybernetics moment. III. Title: Why we call our age the information age.
Q360.K56 2015
303.48'33—dc23 2014035091
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whenever possible.
To the memory of Alfred Motz, Margot Ruth Marcotte,
Maggie Marcotte Mattke, Raymond Orville Kline,
and Nellie Frank Motz
Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which
does not admit this can survive at the present day.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948
I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955
contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 War and Information Theory 9
2 Circular Causality 37
3 The Cybernetics Craze 68
4 The Information Bandwagon 102
5 Humans as Machines 135
6 Machines as Human 152
7 Cybernetics in Crisis 179
8 Inventing an Information Age 202
9 Two Cybernetic Frontiers 229
Abbreviations 245
Notes 249
Index 325
vii
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Acknowledgments
It is my pleasure to acknowledge the many students, colleagues, and
institutions who assisted me during the decade and a half I spent re-
searching and writing this book.
I especially want to thank Terry Fine and Christina Dunbar-Hester for
their advice, assistance, and support over the years. Terry, a professor emer-
itus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Cornell
University, a friend and colleague whose office was down the hall from mine
for many years (in my joint appointment between ECE and the Science and
Technology Studies Department in the Arts College), helped me understand
the basic principles of information theory, discussed the often testy relation-
ships between that field and cybernetics during his career, and critiqued my
account of the field he loves. As a Ph.D. student in science and technology
studies, Christina, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, served
as a sounding board and friendly critic of the ideas in this book when she
was at Cornell, particularly when she took my seminar on cybernetics and
helped me teach an undergraduate course on the history of information
technology. In combing through the massive Warren McCulloch Papers at
the American Philosophical Society as a research assistant, Christina deep-
ened the research for the book at a critical time. Her comments on several
chapters were insightful.
I would also like to thank other former students for their research assis-
tance: Alec Shuldiner, for finding material on the development of information
theory in the extensive AT&T archives; Albert Tu, for copying newspaper
and magazine articles on cybernetics and information theory; Lav Varshney,
for researching the acceptance of information theory in American electrical
engineering journals and for alerting me to obscure published sources on
Claude Shannon; and Daniel Kreiss at Stanford University, for gathering
material on NASA’s cyborg project at the Ames Research Center. Thanks
also to Glen Bugos at NASA, for helping navigate the Ames Research Center
archives, and to Rachel Prentice at Cornell and David Hounshell at Carnegie-
ix