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at Harvard, Cornell, Cambridge, and Gvttingen universities, and became professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1932-1960). During World War II he worked on guided missiles. Wiener's study of the handling of information by electronic devices, guided by the feedback principle, encouraged comparison between these and human mental processes in his book Cybernetics (1948) and other works. CYBERNETICS (according to Wiener) Norbert Wiener described cybernetics as the study of the interaction between man, machine and animals. The world is said to be a big enclosed system. This means that at some time any given action is going to cycle back around to the beginning. Cybernetics is closely related to the ideas of 'feedback' and'self-regulation' Cybernetic systems tell themselves how to react to changes in environmental and internal stimuli. Feedback is an important part of cybernetics. Output is not only effected by the current input but also the previous inputs and outputs. The basic principles of cybernetics can be applied to different systems - electronic, computing or even biological. Cyborgs are cybernetic organisms The term cyborg itself was coined in the 1960s by space scientist Manfred Clynes. Cyborgs are an amalgam of flesh and hardware. Although the cyborg might be considered a conceptual being, a figment of science fiction, the ability of humans to modify their bodies and minds has made the cyborg an everyday reality. During the Age of Industrialisation (19th century), machines, tools, and devices of all sorts were developed as extensions and prosthesis of the human body. This not only to fulfil certain functions but also to replace parts of the imperfect human body. The cyborg of the late twentieth century is moving towards prosthetic union with information technology.
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CYBORG
BIOLOGISM
The tendency to use biological concepts, metaphors, and explanations in the analysis of social situations. In communications research for instance the concept of the body - from cellular activity to neuro-systems has been used extensively to explain processes which might be more properly understood in ways other than the scientific.
Positivism
Logical positivism - also known as scientific EMPIRICISM - is a modern school of philosophy which in the 1920s attempted to introduce the
methodology and precision of mathematics to the study of philosophy. Led by the Vienna Circle, a group including the philosophers Rudolf CARNAP and Moritz Schlick, the logical positivists held that metaphysical speculation is nonsensical; that logical and mathematical propositions are tautological; and that moral and value statements are merely emotive. The function of philosophy, they maintained, is to clarify concepts in both everyday and scientific language. The Vienna Circle disintegrated in the late 1930s after the Nazis took Austria, but its influence spread throughout Europe and America, and its concept, particularly its emphasis on the analysis of language as the function of philosophy, has been carried on throughout the West. Jane Addams and Hull House Jane Addams was in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6, 1860 and graduated from Rockford College in 1882, Jane Addams founded the world famous social settlement Hull-House on Chicago's Near West Side in 1889. From Hull House, where she lived and worked until her death in 1935, Jane Addams built her reputation as the country's most prominent woman through her writing, her settlement work, and her international efforts for world peace. Around Hull-House, immigrants to Chicago crowded into a residential and industrial neighborhood. Italians, Russian and Polish Jews, Irish, Germans, Greeks and Bohemians predominated. Jane Addams and the other residents of the settlement provided services for the neighborhood, such as kindergarten and daycare facilities for children of working mothers, an employment bureau, an art gallery, libraries, and music and art classes. By 1900 Hull House activities had broadened to include the Jane Club (a cooperative residence for working women), the first Little Theater in America, a Labor Museum and a meeting place for trade union groups.
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In the field of linguistics the structuralist work of Ferdinand de SAUSSURE, undertaken just prior to World War I, long served as model and inspiration. In the domain of anthropology and myth studies, the work done in the immediate postWorld War II period by Claude LEVI-STRAUSS introduced structuralist principles to a wide audience. In humanistic and literary studies, structuralism is applied most effectively in the field of "narratology." This nascent discipline studies all narratives, whether or not they use language; myths and legends, novels and news accounts, histories, relief sculptures and stainedglass windows, pantomimes and psychological case studies. Using structuralist methods and principles, narratologists analyse the systematic features and functions of narratives, attempting to isolate a finite set of rules to account for the infinite set of real and possible narratives. Starting in the 1960s, the French critic Roland Barthes and several other French narratologists popularised the field, which has since become an important method of analysis in the United States as well.
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Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was born in 1857 and died in 1913. He is known as the founder of structuralism. de Saussure was professor at Geneva (1901-13) where he developed an innovative course, overturning the orthodox views of German philology and laid the basis for a new approach not just to linguistics, but to anthropology and sociology as well. He wrote Mmoire sur le systme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europennes (1879) but his Cours de linguistique gnrale (1916), posthumously edited from his students' lecture notes, is one of the foremost works giving stimulus and direction to modern linguistics. de Saussure rejects the positivist conception of language as one of simple correspondence to the physical world. Words, he says exist primarily in relation to one another, before they exist in relation to an object. It is the relation of sign to the code of signification that accords it meaning, rather than a simple correspondence with an external object. de Saussure took language out of the realm of logic, to look at language and its
grammar as an object of study in its own right. Charles Sanders Peirce Peirce was born in 1839 and died in 1914. He is regarded, with de Saussure as the founder of modern semiotics. A natural scientist by training and the son of the eminent mathematician Benjamin Peirce, he developed the philosophical basis of semiotics in a series of articles in the late 1860s Questions Concerning Certain Capacities Claimed for Man and Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. There Peirce levelled a devastating critique of Cartesian philosophy arguing the nature of a sign is fallible, and thoroughly immersed in a continuing process of interpretation. He considered his semiotics as a general theory of logic. Interesting Link for Peirce - www.peirce.org
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Roland Barthes, was born in 1915. He attended the University of Paris and taught at French Universities in Romania and Egypt. His book Mythologies is a collection of short essays which analyse the meaning of everything around him. Even in the most simple things Barthes found a deeper and hidden significance. The mythology essays were composed at a rate of one each month, for two years, beginning in 1954. When beginning to write, Barthes strived to focus on the myths of everyday French life. There is no real connection between the essays from month to month. Rather, they are more or less connected by Barthes' use of similar ideas. Barthes, like de Saussure was interested in alternatives to traditional liberal concepts of the subject. This led Barthes to use semiotics to 'overthrow the intentional fallacy of authorship'. Barthes reversed the commonsense view that authors wrote texts to argue - cryptically - that texts 'wrote' authors. What he meant was that specific genres of literature pre-existed the authors that contributed to them, so, for example, the detective story comes before Hammett. Fulfilling the code of the genre, the author is an effect of the discourse, not its originator. The slogan of semiotics became 'The death of the author'.
4th edition by James Watson and Anne Hill Arnold. London, 1997.
"A form, mode or genre of language-use. Each person has in his/her repertoire a whole range of possible discourses - the language of love, of authority, of sport, of the domestic scene. In a media sense, an example of a discourse would be the news, reflecting in its choice of language and style of presentation the social, economic, political and cultural context from which the discourse eminates."
Gunter Kress (in Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice (Australia. Deakin University Press, 1985.), provides the following useful explanantion of discourse:
"Institutions and social groupings have specific meanings and values which are articulated in language in sytematic ways. Following the work particularly of Michel Foucault, I efer to these systematicallyorganised modes of talking as discourse.'
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world, the theory tries to uncover these underlying patterns and what this might ultimately say about us. Rather than explaining or interpreting stories or their authors, narrative theory asks how the stories we tell, or exchange, produce us. The theory encompasses narratives broadly allowing engagement with everyday forms such as television news programs.
understanding postmodernity to be as an antithetical proposal to modernity. As such Habermas interprets the postmodern movement as an expression of a new social conservatism. Habermas LINK:www.helsinki.fi/~amkauppi/hablinks.html Some books by Jurgen Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971 Toward a Rational Society, 1971 Communication and the Evolution of Society, 1979 On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 1988 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989 Between Facts and Norms, 1997