Cybernetics and Information Technology
Michael Sean Mahoney · 2020
Since the Second World War, ‘information’ has emerged as a fundamental scientific and technological concept applied to phenomena ranging from black holes to DNA, from the organisation of cells to the processes of human thought and from the management of corporations to the allocation of global resources. In addition to reshaping established disciplines, it has stimulated the formation of a panoply of new subjects and areas of inquiry concerned with its structure and its role in nature and society. Embodied in the computer, theories based on the concept of ‘information’ have so permeated modern culture that it is now widely taken to characterise our times. We live in an ‘information society’, an ‘age of information’.