Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001)

“Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.

After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”

Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.”

Publisher SIU Press, 2001
ISBN 0809323907, 9780809323906
152 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)

William Ross Ashby: Design for a Brain (1952/1954)

Landmark work of the pioneer of cybernetics.

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, New York (1954)
ASIN: B0007IYC5Y
259 pages

More info (archive.org)

PDF

Norbert Wiener: God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964–) [EN, RU, ES, RO]

“In this book, Norbert Wiener concerns himself with major points in cybernetics which are relevant to religious issues.

The first point he considers is that of the machine which learns. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to the self-conscious living system, a computer now exists which not only can be programmed to play a game of checkers, but one which can “learn” from its past experience and improve on its own game. For a time, the machine was able to beat its inventor at checkers. “It did win,” writes the author, “and it did learn to win; and the method of its learning was no different in principle from that of the human being who learns to play checkers.

A second point concerns machines which have the capacity to reproduce themselves. It is our commonly held belief that God made man in his own image. The propagation of the race may also be interpreted as a function in which one living being makes another in its own image. But the author demonstrates that man has made machines which are “very well able to make other machines in their own image,” and these machine images are not merely pictorial representations but operative images. Can we then say: God is to Golem as man is to Machines? in Jewish legend, golem is an embryo Adam, shapeless and not fully created, hence a monster, an automation.

The third point considered is that of the relation between man and machine. The concern here is ethical. “render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s,” warns the author. In this section of the book, Dr. Wiener considers systems involving elements of man and machine.

The book is written for the intellectually alert public and does not involve any highly technical knowledge. It is based on lectures given at Yale, at the Société Philosophique de Royaumont, and elsewhere.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1964
ISBN 0262730111, 9780262730112
ix+95 pages

Publisher

God and Golem (English, 1964, updated on 2021-4-8)
Tvorets i robot (Russian, trans. M.N. Aronz and R.A. Fesenko, 1966, DJVU, added on 2021-4-8)
Dios y Golem (Spanish, trans. Javier Alejo, 1967, EPUB, added on 2021-4-8)
Dumnezeu şi Golem (Romanian, trans. Edmond Nicolau and Lucia Nasta, 1969, added on 2021-4-8)