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Thomas Fischer (American Society for Cybernetics)
Cybernetic reentry: towards a reflexive pedagogy for cybernetics
Abstract.As a way of conceptualizing and of pursuing epistemological practices, such as learning, designing and researching, cybernetics should enjoy a front row position within academic settings today. However, being aligned orthogonally to – and occasionally challenging – the utilitarianism, revenue models, reward-orientation, and control structures of many academic and research organizations, cybernetics as an academic discipline is in serious crisis. In many parts of the world, it no longer enjoys the levels of funding support, student numbers, academic workforce and opportunities to offer study programs it enjoyed a few decades ago. While many cybernetic ideas and theories have been absorbed by other fields, where they are pursued in specialist engineering approaches, the study of cybernetics as a generalist philosophy has all but disappeared from formal curricula in many parts of the world. Furthermore, in many parts of the word the more generalist subject of cybernetics and its more specialist sister subject of computing have drifted apart, resulting in a disciplinary as well as philosophical fragmentation of the field.
Keywords: Cybernetics, reflexive pedagogy, second-order cybernetic concepts
In some ways, cybernetics is back where it was shortly after World War II, having to rely on its appeal to bright and enthusiastic minds to approach and pursue the subject, to build new communities, and to develop the future of cybernetics practically from scratch. Given the success of cybernetics in the middle of the last century, it is prudent to take a look back, and to examine how early cybernetic thinkers may have connected with control and communication early in their lives.
It may be no coincidence that cybernetics owes its greatest advances to a generation, which, during its childhood years, commonly played with toy steam engines. This toy may very well have played a key role in acquainting this generation early on with principles of control and communication, of measurement, signaling and adaptation via feedback, to instill an interest in self-regulating systems. Being mass manufactured, the toy steam engine was itself a product of the industrial paradigm initiated by its full-scale predecessor, and as a miniaturized reincarnation, it helped a new generation to pave the path from the industrial era to the information era.
In the information age, however, technical principles of communication and control manifest themselves far beyond the thresholds of human perception in miniscule, electrical and optical signals, and have thus escaped from the realm of playful childhood experience. In contrast to the steam engine and the immediate comprehensibility of the functional principles underlying its operation, more recent cybernetic concepts are less accessible to early learning and study. This begs the question: What learning resources and playthings can cybernetics offer to young people in this day and age to learn its key principles, and to possibly help develop cybernetics further in the future?
In the past decade, there have been proposals and initiatives the within the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) to develop an introductory course to cybernetics, referred to as "Cybernetics 101". For the most part, these initiatives are currently dormant. One important reason for this appears to be a dilemma between the ambition to create a general, one-fits-all curriculum on the one hand, and the large degree to which the promotion of cybernetics depended on particular individuals in the past.
This is a proposal for a presentation of an initiative that aims to develop a suitable and contemporary pedagogy for cybernetics and related learning materials for both individual as well as for organized learning. It is at this time a personal initiative, but this may change in the future. Analogously to Margaret Mead‘s (1968) call to the American Society for Cybernetics to apply cybernetics to itself ("cybernetics of cybernetics"), it aims to utilize cybernetic resources and accomplishments of the past in the pedagogy of cybernetics to perpetuate the discipline into the future in times of dwindling institutional support. It takes a hands-on, constructivist learning approach with a focus on applied computer-programming based exercises using low-cost hardware and free software.
Its primary goal is to introduce key first-
