Week 10: The fantastic four VS Wiener & Hayles

Wiener gives us the long explanation for why cybernetic systems. In a nutshell the world isn’t based on linear exception-less rules like Newtonian physics suggest – uncertainty and exceptions to rules must be accepted as an essential part of the very set of rules governing our world. Therefore we cannot expect to build machines that communicate adequately with their environment if they expect to receive input that isn’t really just a statistical probability of being the something which you expect it to be. Wiener says that this is the basis on which animal-world communication works, and human-world communication works as well. He says understanding communication is key to understanding society because society is but communication channels. He says machines’ communication will have an increasingly important role in society since there are machines everywhere and there will be more. 

Hayles is much more interesting but who likes Wieners anyway. She says that meaning is a mechanical process which happens inside the body, taking for input perceived changes in the outside world and then processing them to drive more mechanical processes inside and outside the body. “the meaning of information is given by the processes that interpret it”. This is true in the physical and computational world as well. A message can be fully defined or represented by the processes or responses it evokes. Media can be understood in four levels: material, technological, semiotic and its social context. Cybernetics and feedback loops are important because they describe that very notion of mechanical response to information in its simplest form. 

Hayles discusses the implications of this kind of thought in the relationship between man and computer. Especially interesting was this notion that translating message into mechanical responses would lead to the idea of being able to transferring the brain into a computer.