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  • The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age by Ronald R. Klein
  • Heather A. Love (bio)
Ronald R. Klein, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 352 pp. $24.95 paper.

In The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, Ronald R. Kline sets out to chart "the intellectual and cultural history of the information discourses of the Cold War" by asking "why we came to believe that we live in an information age, what work it took to make this a naturalized narrative, what scientific and engineering practices enabled this narrative, and what was at stake for groups in academia, government, industry, and the press to claim that an information revolution was at hand" (pp. 5–6). This cluster of institutional references signals the book's expansive reach. And indeed, its chapters live up to the promise, as Kline traverses fields ranging from technical experiments to philosophical debates and from CIA advisory boards to science-fiction cyborgs. His impressively researched study uses this breadth of material to focus on the paired disciplines of cybernetics and information theory, which he describes as possessing an "interdisciplinary allure" that allowed their meanings and applications to proliferate and fracture within an array of contexts as the twentieth century progressed (p. 3).

Kline unifies the book's diverse frames of reference through his central thesis: that "disunity" constitutes a central feature of both cybernetics- and information-focused fields (p. 7). This perspective explicitly seeks to counter and correct extant (and, as he sees them, reductive) understandings of both, namely, that cybernetics presented itself as a "universal discipline" (p. 7), and that the "Information Age" was the inevitable defining term for late twentieth-century society. Through explicit calls to readers as well as his book's underlying methodology, Kline instead advocates attentiveness to complexity—that is, the complexity of shifting interpersonal relationships, multi-disciplinary academic institutions, contested cultural contexts, and tangled discursive networks. Only by "recovering the contestations of the past and the paths not taken," he posits, can we hope to accurately comprehend and ethically navigate our twenty-first-century existence within the so-called Information Age (p. 244).

One of the book's most compelling features, at least for scholars working in literary and humanities-focused fields, is the close attention it pays to the rhetorical and discursive elements that have shaped perceptions of cybernetics and information across public, scientific, military, and cultural discourses. Rather than concentrate solely on the technical or institutional histories of these fields, Kline reveals how their definitions and connotations shift and accrue a range of (often competing) meanings depending on who uses them, to what ends, and in what contexts. "Information," for instance, may, for a communications engineer at Bell Laboratories like Claude Shannon, constitute the topic of a "technical treatise" focused on concrete issues like "coding theorems" and "channel capacity" (p. 14). By contrast, a more philosophically minded thinker like MIT mathematician (and so-called father of cybernetics) Norbert Wiener considers the broader "importance of information in society," including its potential implications for labor, medicine, and even the ethics of scientific experimentation (p. 14). Furthermore, different forms of media coverage put very different spins on the significance of emergent information theories, as Kline explains with reference to a swath of publishing venues that includes Fortune and Business Week alongside the Encyclopedia Britannica, Scientific American, and even Vogue (see pp. 121–128). On the experimental side of things, Kline shows how mid-century "scientists and engineers were 'innovative users' of information theory" who significantly "changed" that theory as they applied it to an array of disciplines and problems (p. 134). Information-based rhetoric could transform disciplines, too. In psychology, for instance, a lasting effect of cybernetics was "the introduction of an information discourse" that "helped [End Page 557] establish information processing as the paradigm for the new fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive science" (pp. 140–141). In sum, Kline's careful explication of these interlocking discursive networks shows how different rhetorical deployments of disciplinary concepts can actively shape even the scientific and institutional communities that supposedly...

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