# Cybernetics

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133/cybernetics
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133/cybernetics.md
Podcast: [In Our Time](https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133)
Published: 2026-05-28T09:15:00+00:00
Episode link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vmk4
Audio file: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0nh72k9.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-our-time-318133/episodes/cybernetics
Duration seconds: 3158

## Resource

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age. With Jacob Ward Historian of science and technology at Maastricht University Jon Agar Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London And Orit Halpern Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: Peter Galison, 'The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision' (Critical Inquiry 21, 1994) Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2004) Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke University Press, 2015) Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique (Grey Room 68, 2017) Orit Halpern, Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets (e-flux, March 2023) N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University…

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