Of the five introductions we were tasked with reading, the ones that I landed on were The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald Kline, The Information by James Gleick, and Media Technology and Society by Brian Winston. Kline’s introduction provided context for the rise of the term cybernetics in the wake of the information age. For Kline, the information age describes a recent phenomenon that people proclaim we are living in with its roots in cybernetics and so-called “electronic brains.” I think that Kline’s thoughts about the origin of the term information age and the history of the discipline are interesting, but his definition of the information age as it being a second half of the 20th century and onwards period doesn’t resonate with me as much. Gleick’s understanding of the information age comes with a more historical and scientific perspective. He reasons that the invention of the bit as a measurement of information allows for a greater understanding of information as mathematical. Gleick claims that, “for the purposes of science, information had to mean something special.” (Gleick, pg. 7) I think that studying this moment of quantifying information and how that has influenced our modern understanding could be an interesting topic to explore this semester. Winston takes a more critical and philosophical approach to the information age, analyzing semantics and how our understanding of these technological advancements are impacted by the words we use to describe them. Winston uses many models to try and demonstrate his argument about how words/concepts interact with one another, but I didn’t much care for his premise, especially when compared to Kline and Gleick. Reading through all of these gave me a potential idea for class this semester, where one class we try and crowdsource definitions to terms (similar to what we did on the first day of class) with debates about semantics and what meanings we give to words. Something like that where groups have to debate each other about interpretive definitions might be an interesting way to think about different perspectives on whatever we would be talking about.
