NORBERT AND GREGORY

Abstract

In this article, I shall examine the way in which information was central to the development of cybernetics. I particularly contrast the different uses of the concept by two key participants in that development – Norbert Wiener, who argued that information was a quasi-physical concept related to the degree of organization in a system; and Gregory Bateson, who considered information to be a process of human meaning formation. I suggest that these two authors exemplify a hard and a soft strand of cybernetics, present from the start of the field. I trace through these two different interpretations of information as they developed in the cybernetics movement, and on the way they have fed into more recent understandings of information within cybernetics and related fields, especially in family therapy and sociology. I also relate these ideas to the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and others.

Keywords:

• information
• cybernetics
• history of ideas
• Norbert Wiener
• Gregory Bateson
• cyborgs

Acknowledgements

This article arises out of two long-running projects at the Open University, and I am very grateful to my collaborators on both projects for many ideas that have fed into this work: Karen Shipp on the lives and works of major systems thinkers; and David Chapman on the nature of information. The article was read by members of the Society and Information Research Group and by Rebecca Calcraft, and their comments helped me to shape it considerably. Earlier versions of this article were presented as talks to workshops in Milton Keynes and Stockholm; I am grateful to the participants in those workshops for encouraging and challenging discussions, especially Chris Bissell and Bernard Scott. Many thanks also to Marianne Franklin, Key Thinkers series editor, and two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful and incisive comments.