Gordon Pask: Heinz von Foerster’s Self Organization, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories (1996)

“Over more than three decades Heinz von Foerster and I have collaborated and worked together as well as in separate laboratories. This contribution gives a terse account of work which we have done together and which is relevant to Heinz’ prescient notion of self organization and its many arborizations. In the course of doing so it spells out some of the history associated with cybernetics to which both Heinz and I adhere.” (Abstract)

The last paper Gordon Pask wrote before his death in 1996.

Published in Systems Research 13(3), pp. 349-362, 1996

Keywords
concept, conversation (theory), interaction (of actors theory), observer, P-individual, self-organization, spin

PDF (updated on 2020-4-17)

Brian Winston: Media Technology and Society. A History From the Printing Press to the Superhighway (1998)

How are media born? How do they change? And how do they change us?

Media Technology and Society offers a comprehensive account of the history of communications technologies, from the printing press to the internet. Brian Winston argues that the development of new media, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited. Winston’s fascinating account examines the role played by individuals such as Alexander Graham Bell, Gugliemo Marconi, John Logie Baird, Boris Rozing and Charles Babbage, and challenges the popular myth of the present-day “information revolution.”

Publisher Routledge, 1998
ISBN 041514230X, 9780415142304
374 pages

Keywords and phrases
ENIAC, AT&T, Bell Labs, EDVAC, cathode ray tube, Intelsat, Bletchley Park, integrated circuit, UNIVAC, selenium, microprocessor, point-contact transistor, iconoscope, ARPANET, NTSC, solid state electronics, However, differential analyser, holography, Entscheidungsproblem

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman: Dark Hero of the Information Age. In Search Of Norbert Wiener–Father of Cybernetics (2004)

In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener–ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician–founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of “feedback,” and his ideas informed the work of computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. So why is his work virtually unknown today? And what, in fact, is his legacy? In this book, award-winning journalists Conway and Siegelman set out to rescue Wiener’s genius from obscurity and to explore the many ways in which his groundbreaking ideas continue to shape our lives.

Publisher Basic Books, 2004
ISBN 0738203688, 9780738203683
423 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)