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

I can only speak for myself but, for me, this book is an exhaustive and exhausting history of who said what to whom during the early days of cybernetics, especially at the Macy conferences. I appreciate the effort, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees. Cybernetics was a new epistemology, a new way of looking at things, and I think it failed because it was too disruptive and too vaguely formed. It was both dismissed by scientists and embraced by kooks. It tried to take too big a bite out of the apple. It's lofty goal, a unified theory of knowledge, was either too vague to implement or too complicated to pursue. It was too threatening, especially to experts in the social sciences, to say that you may have to go back to the drawing board.While the people mentioned in this book may have been intrigued by the ideas of cybernetics, none, with the exception of Bateson, seemed willing to see the need to totally reinterpret our understanding of knowledge as a reflexive loop. (On that point, I'm not sure why Heinz Von Forester is not more prominently mentioned in this book.)The subtitle of this book is WHY WE CALL OUR AGE THE INFORMATION AGE. The word information as used today is interchangeable with the word computer or digital. It has nothing to do with arguments over it’s formal definition in cybernetics that people argued over. It has all to do with how the computer became the new, shinny object that changed how we live our lives. Cybernetics never achieved that status. It's current status may be more as a harbinger of doom then as the next new thing.

Thanks.