Cybernetics
Cybernetics is defined classically as the study of "control and communication in the animal and the machine" (Wiener 1948). After the decline of classical cybernetics, the field underwent a rebirth as "second-order cybernetics" in the early 1970s. Second-order cybernetics is more closely and more obviously involved with ethics than classical cybernetics (and certainly promotes a radically different worldview), but both have important contributions to make to reflections on science, technology, and ethics. Cyberculture, an increasingly important phenomenon that includes elements as diverse as email and chat rooms, electronic commerce and gaming, virtual reality and digital politics, has its origins not just in computers but also in the lesser known field of cybernetics (from which it takes its name).
Cybernetics
Cybernetics was originally promoted by the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) in his 1948 book of that name (although W. Ross Ashby's 1956 book, An Introduction to Cybernetics, is considered the classic introductory text). The terms of cybernetics (including goals and purposiveness, feedback, and mechanism as metaphor) had been previously used, as was the concept of control as attaining and maintaining desired states, rather than restricting the actions of others—but not as concepts forged into a coherent field. In the development of cybernetics, two groups were particularly important: the informal association of Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth (1900–1970), and Julian Bigelow (1913–2003) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and the Josiah Macy Jr.
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