Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our tenth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> (ECCO 2014-2015)
Time: Friday November 7, 14h-16h Place: *room D.1.06* ------------------------------ Societal Cybernetics Harry Halpin <http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/> and Smári McCarthy <http://smarimccarthy.is/> (resp W3C/MIT and Icelandic Modern Media Institute) Abstract: Our global society is increasingly dominated by the cybernetics, the study of control and communication in man and machine as invented by Norbert Wiener. While the very discipline of "cybernetics" is barely touched upon in traditional computer science academia, cybernetics provide the foundations for the logistical and machine-learning revolution of our current era. Yet unlike traditional cybernetics from the 1940s and 50s which attempted to model human intelligence on a cognitive and neural level, today cybernetics are being applied to all of society, including re-inventing 19th century institutions of governance and economics. We'll trace the hidden history of "societal cybernetics" from the involvement of the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the original Macy conferences, to the work of Stafford Beer on Allende's "socialist internet", to its modern day incarnation in Google and the Pirate Parties. We'll outline the main dangers and promises of this new societal cybernetics. If power is no longer defined by state-sponsored disciplinary violence, but by communication, the control of communication is the present dominant form of power. Can in today's world people control their own communication? ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars *Nov. 14 * Lotte van Lith *Terrible too (l)s: Giftedness, personality development and emotional complexity* *Nov. 21 * Ivo Velitchkov *Requisite Inefficiency* *Nov. 28* Jerome C. Glenn *The Global Futures Intelligence System* *Dec. 5 * Petter Braathen *Linking Complexity Science and Strategic Management* *Dec. 12 * Ben Collins *The Internet of Places/ The Future of Brands* *Dec. 19 * Jeanne Dietsch *Interactions of emotion, rationality, faith and institutions on the outcomes of trust* See also the ECCO/GBI calendar <https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=azMyN252aWluM2JoMnU3MXY5OGt2ZzliOGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ> . You can add this calendar to your calendar application through here <https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/k327nviin3bh2u71v98kvg9b8g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 -- Evo Evo Busseniers - Seminar Coordinator ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: http://vub.academia.edu/EvoBusseniers <http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9/>
