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As the first narrative to integrate the many dimensions of cybernetics into a single narrative, this book presents a new answer to this crucial question. For Ronald Kline, cybernetics was most critically a site of contestation, and more specifically of what sociologists term boundary work. Practitioners continuously fought over and redrew the borders of cybernetics, demarcating it from adjacent disciplines like information theory, general systems theory, and bionics, and dividing cybernetics itself into subdisciplines like management cybernetics and medical cybernetics. Many of the founders of the field had the ambition to create a universal discipline, but Kline emphasizes their failure to do so, as practitioners disagreed about the content of cybernetics, fractured it into more narrowly defined disciplines, or carried lessons back to traditional disciplines and, thus, abandoned the project of building a new one. Kline's emphasis on boundary work is supported by his careful attention to shifting alliances, discourses, and research programs. He points out, for example, that the cofounders of cybernetics who attended the Macy Conferences in the 1940s and 1950s focused on feedback and circular causality only in their first meetings; after about 1949, they fixed their attention firmly on the question of how to measure information. Concepts and discourses of information remain a central dimension of the book from that point forward; it devotes a chapter to how scientists constructed information theory as a distinct discipline in the 1950s, and another to how the phrases information technology and information society became ubiquitous tools for making sense of technology and society in the 1980s and 1990s. Kline's accounts of the relationships between cybernetics and the fringe are strongest in these accounts of the 1950s, when many of those involved were canonical founders of cybernetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following two books are reviewed: ENIAC ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (Haigh, T., et al; 2016) and FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World (Misa, T.J. and Yost, J.R.; 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an important and provocative book that effectively describes some major concerns of our era. Her target is electronic communications media that emerged in our time ? most notably the smartphone and handheld mobile devices like the iPad. Lest you think that the telephone?s ability to shape history and civilization are nothing compared to our newest communications gadets. The author believes in the power of conversation and see the new forms of electronic communication as eroding ways in which people communicate with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Reviews department article covers Dependable and Historic Computing: Essays Dedicated to Brian Randell on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday edited by Cliff B. Jones and John L. Lloyd (Springer, 2011), Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age by Megan Prelinger (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), and The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 by Payal Arora (Routledge, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In choosing to write about the history of an idea, the author has undertaken one of the most difficult of historical tasks, and it?s no wonder it took him the better part of fifteen years to complete the book. Biographies start and end with the subject?s life. Histories of a particular technology have similar well-defined limits. But the history of an idea, especially an idea as multifaceted and chameleon-like as cybernetics, can easily turn into a cat-herding expedition. Fortunately, the author is a masterful historian who knows his way around archives and among the ways of researchers, and he explores the many meanings and ramifications of the cybernetics concept from its birth to the 1980s, by which time most of the early participants had either died or returned to their respective traditional disciplines. Because cybernetics involved so wide a range of disciplines, researchers, and institutions, the author has trouble maintaining a clear story line through the book. It is not fair to say that the total is less than the sum of its parts, but the nature of his subject forces te author to run back and forth along the historical timeline as he takes up different aspects of his subject. Perhaps the book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology. While cybernetics as an independent discipline has largely vanished from the scene, many concepts and disciplines that are still with us today were born in, or at least influenced by, the chaotic and exciting times when the term held great promise and unlocked the coffers of research foundations of the 1950s. Even when research is funded as part of a fad, it can still do some good, and that may be the best lesson to be learned from The Cybernetics Moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Here, Jeffrey Shallit reviews the book It Began with Babbage: The Genesis of Computer Science by Subrata Dasgupta, assessing its contents, organization, and the audience for which it's suitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]