Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of "Information Technology" as a Keyword, 1948-1985

In November 1981, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed 1982 as "Information Technology Year, IT-82." Her government aimed to reinvigorate the country's electronics industry to keep it from falling further behind the United States and Japan in the booming markets of microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications. To celebrate IT-82, the British government issued an IT stamp and commissioned an IT play and an IT ballet. In writing about these events, science journalist John Lamb attributed the concept of an "information society" to American mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. Lamb claimed that the phrase information technology was "coined only about two years ago."¹

Lamb's attribution of the concept appears accurate: in Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener had written about the coming of a "second industrial revolution" based on the processing of information in computerized, automated factories. Lamb was wrong about the coinage, however. The term information technology arose in management science in the United States in the 1960s, where it signified computer-based mathematical techniques designed to replace mid-level managers. By the early 1980s, several discourse communities—policy analysts, business writers, managers, information scientists, and social scientists—had transformed this knowledge-based meaning into the artifactual meaning described by Lamb. This contested process occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of rapid change in computers and communications that formed the basis of what became widely known as information technology.²

In this essay, I ask why these discourse communities created the new term, and why it was selected for general use over the more common terms information system and information retrieval. In short, I ask what it meant to combine information, an ordinary word elevated to keyword through the popularity of cybernetics and the marriage of computers and communications, with technology, a much older keyword that had only recently acquired the meaning of a powerful social force.³

Before analyzing the discourse on information technology among business groups, social scientists, and policy analysts primarily in the United States, I will describe how information became a keyword in the physical and social sciences. My aim is not to adjudicate the various meanings of these words or provide yet another critique of the technological determinism that infused this discourse.⁴ Instead, I will treat the diverse meanings as a resource for studying how and why a variety of communities helped to create and express the apparently new phenomena signified by information and information technology, as well as how and why they used techno-revolutionary language to promote new disciplines and technologies.⁵

Information as Keyword

In designating information and information technology as "keywords," I am applying the analytical framework developed by Raymond Williams in his cultural history of British society; however, I examine their meanings as used among professional groups, rather than in the wider culture that was the focus of Williams's work.

Williams identified certain terms—culture, science, technology, and society among them—as keywords in "two connected senses: they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought. Certain uses bound together certain ways of seeing culture and society, not least in these two most general words." Over time, culture came to encompass a variety of contested meanings. "These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate."⁶

Information has all the earmarks of a keyword. Its traditional meanings of the "action of informing" and "knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event" expanded dramatically with the development of electronic computers, satellite communications, and new information disciplines in the...