Cybernetics, management science, and technology policy: The emergence of "information technology" as a keyword, 1948-1985

Technology and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 513-535

  Kline, Ronald R ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748576280     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0184     Document Type: Review

References (182)

1. John Lamb, "IT 82 - a Critical Year for Britain," New Scientist, 28 January 1982, 221.
2. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1948);
3. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York, 1950).
4. On discourse communities, see Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999), introduction.
5. On the histories of the separate terms information and technology, see Rafael Capurro and Birger Hjorland, "The Concept of Information," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37 (2003): 343-411;
6. Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept," Social Research 64 (1997): 965-88;
7. Oldenziel, chap. 1; and the preceding article by Eric Schatzberg, "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930," Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 486-512.
8. See Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994);
9. and Ronald Kline, "Technological Determinism," in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 3rd ed., ed. Neil J. Smelsa and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam, 2001), 12:15, 495-98.
10. This essay is part of a larger project on the history of cybernetics, information theory, and discussion about an information society in which I relate the professional discourses discussed here to those in the wider culture. On the use of the rhetoric of technological determinism in this manner, see Pablo J. Boczkowski, "Affording Flexibility: Transforming Information Practices in On-Line Newspapers" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2001), chap. 2.
11. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1983), 15, 92.
12. Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield, "Cultural Diversity in Studies of Information," in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, ed. Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield (New York, 1983), 3-56.
13. The definitions here are from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed.
14. See Hans Wellisch, "From Information Science to Informatics: A Terminological Investigation," Journal of Librarianship 4 (1972): 157-87;
15. Alvin M. Schrader, "In Search of a Name: Information Science and Its Conceptual Antecedents," Library and Information Science Research 6 (1984): 227-71;
16. Fritz Machlup, "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information," in The Study of Information, 641-71; and Capurro and Hjorland (n. 3 above).
17. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999), chap. 3.
18. The classic sources for this definition of information are Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423, 623-56;
19. and Wiener, Cybernetics (n. 2 above), 76.
20. Machlup, "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information," 642-49;
21. and Thomas Haigh, "Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968," Business History Review 75 (2001): 46-47.
22. See Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think (New York, 1949);
23. Irwin Pollack, "Information Theory," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. David L. Sills (New York, 1968), 7:331-37;
24. and Mark D. Bowles, "Liquefying Information: Controlling the Flood in the Cold War and Beyond," in Cultures of Control, ed. Miriam R. Levin (Amsterdam, 2000), 225-46.
25. See Wiener, Cybernetics, 155;
26. and John Diebold, Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory (New York, 1952), 2, 90.
27. In stressing the variety of meanings of the keyword information in an overarching discourse, my approach differs from that of Lily Kay (Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code [Palo Alto, Calif., 2000]),
28. who tends to flatten these differences in her Foucaultian analysis of an information discourse; and from that of Geof Bowker ("How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970," Social Studies of Science 23 [1993]: 107-27),
29. who conflates discourses on information theory and cybernetics; and from that of Mark D. Bowles ("Crisis in the Information Age: How the Information Explosion Threatened Science, Democracy, the Library, and the Human Body, 1945-1994" [Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1999], 20-22), who regards the many postwar interpretations of information as too ambiguous and develops his own definition.
30. Kay, 78-91; and Ronald R. Kline, "What Is Information Theory a Theory Of? Boundary Work among Information Theorists and Information Scientists in the United States and Britain during the Cold War," in The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technical Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, Chemical Heritage Foundation, ed. W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden (Medford, N.J., 2004), 15-28.
31. On the origins of the theory, see William Aspray, "The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985): 117-40;
32. and Jérôme Segal, Le Zéro et le Un: Histoire de la notion scientifique d'information au 20e siè cle (Paris, 2003), chaps. 2-3.
33. See Randall L. Dahling, "Shannon's Information Theory: The Spread of an Idea," in Studies of Innovation and of Communication to the Public, Stanford University, Institute for Communication Research (Palo Alto, Calif., 1962), 117-39;
34. Colin E. Cherry, On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1957);
35. Paul N. Edwards, Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., 1996);
36. Donna J. Haraway, "The High Cost of Information in Post-World War II Evolutionary Biology: Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology of Communication Systems" Philosophical Forum 13 (winter-spring 1981-82): 244-78;
37. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
38. F. Craig Johnson and George R. Klare, "General Models of Communication Research: A Survey of Developments of a Decade," Journal of Communication 11 (1961): 13-26, 45;
39. and Kline, "What Is Information Theory a Theory Of?"
40. E. N. Gilbert, "Information Theory after 18 Years," Science 152 (1966): 320-26;
41. and Andrew J. Viterbi, "Information Theory in the Sixties," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19 (1973): 257-62.
42. Pollack (n. 11 above), 331.
43. See Francis Bello, "The Information Theory," Fortune, December 1953, 136-41, 149-51, 154, 156, 158;
44. and Francis Bello, "Information: Now It's the Realm of Theorists," BusinessWeek, 30 July 1955, 58-60, 62, 64. See also Haigh (n. 10 above).
45. Bowles, "Crisis in the Information Age" (n. 13 above), chap. 7;
46. and Alvin F. Westin, ed., Information Technology in a Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
47. In The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Carbondale, Ill., 2001), Ronald E. Day argues that the current information discourse comes from the merger of three historical strands: the European documentation movement; cybernetics and information theory; and today's discussions about the "virtual." I expand the first two strands to include many more discourses in science, engineering, and the social sciences.
48. Wiener, for his part, thought the book mediocre science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano (New York, 1952), 12-13;
49. and Wiener to Hope English, 17 July 1952, box 10, folder 153, Wiener Papers (hereafter WP), Institute Archives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On Wiener's usage, see Cybernetics (n. 2 above), 37-38;
50. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (n. 2 above), chap. 10.
51. The term "second industrial revolution" dates to the 1920s, when it referred to electrification and the growth of the chemical industry; for its subsequent usage in the history of technology, see I. B. Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 268.
52. Harry M. Davis, "Mathematical Machines," Scientific American, April 1949, 29
53. (cf. Wiener, Cybernetics, 37).
54. See Louis N. Ridenour, "Mechanical Brains," Fortune, May 1949, 109-10, 112, 114, 116-18;
55. Peter Wyden, "Is Revolution of the Machine Coming?" Sf. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 February 1950 (WP, box 25c, folder 379);
56. Mark Starr, review of "The Human Vse of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener," Saturday Review of Literature, 19 August 1950, 15-16;
57. Stuart Chase, "The Next Industrial Revolution: An Age of Machines That Think," review of The Human Use of Human Beings, by Norbert Wiener, New York Herald-Tribune, 20 August 1950, 5;
58. Irwin Edman, "Mind in Matter," New Yorker, 14 October 1950, 124-26, 129;
59. and "Inventor Says Automatic Machines Cannot Replace All Factory Hands," New York Times, 3 December 1952, 4.
60. Henry M. Boettinger, "The Place of Automation in History," Data Processing 2 (1960): 22.
61. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964), 36, 248, 264.
62. Daniel Bell, "The Post-Industrial Society," in Technology and Social Change, ed. Eli Ginzburg (New York, 1964), 44-59.
63. This concept dates back to a liberal discourse of the late 1950s; see Howard Brick, "Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s," American Quarterly 44 (1992): 348-80.
64. Peter F. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York, 1969), 24-28, 261, 263.
65. See Donald M. Lamberton, ed., "The Information Revolution," special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412 (March 1974): 1-234;
66. and Marc U. Porat, The Information Economy: Sources and Methods for Measuring the Primary Information Sector (Washington, D.C., 1977).
67. Compare Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York, 1973), 37,
68. with his "The Social Framework of the Information Society," in The Computer Age: A Twenty-year View, ed. Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 163-211.
69. In "Technik Comes to America" (n. 3 above), Schatzberg gives an example from sociology that dates to 1937.
70. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. "technology" dates these meanings to 1617 and 1957, respectively.
71. Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler, "Management in the 1980s," Harvard Business Review 36 (1958): 41
72. (emphasis in original). This is the earliest usage cited by the OED (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. "information").
73. Thomas L. Whisler and George P. Shultz, "Information Technology and Management Organization," in Management Organization and the Computer, ed. George P. Shultz and Thomas L. Whisler (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), 3, 10-12.
74. Thomas L. Whisler and George P. Shultz, "Automation and the Management Process," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 340 (1962): 82.
75. Herbert A. Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (New York, 1960), 35;
76. Herbert A. Simon, "Supplementary Comments," in Management Organization and the Computer, 61;
77. and John F. Burlingame, "Information Technology and Decentralization," Harvard Business Review 39 (1961): 121-26.
78. Edward A. Tomeski, The Computer Revolution: The Executive and the New Information Technology (New York, 1970), 10 (emphasis in original).
79. William B. Levine, "Developments in Public Administration," Public Administrative Review 21 (1961): 54;
80. Dwight Waldo, "Organization Theory: An Elephantine Problem," Public Administrative Review 21 (1961) : 214-15;
81. William J. Gore, " Developments in Public Administration," Public Administrative Review 22 (1962): 167;
82. Ida Hoos, "Automation, Systems Engineering, and Public Administration," Public Administrative Review 26 (1966): 311.
83. Albert Porter, "The Business-School Transition: From Folklore to Science," Journal of Higher Education 34 (1963): 139;
84. Gilbert Burck, "Management Will Never Be the Same Again," fortune, August 1964, 125.
85. Harold L. Wilensky, "The Uneven Distribution of Leisure: The Impact of Economic Growth on 'Free Time'" Social Problems 9 (1961): 50.
86. Solomon B. Levine, "News and Notes," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14 (1961): 321.
87. Thomas L. Whisler, Information Technology and Organizational Change (Belmont, Calif., 1970), 11.
88. Established at Waltham, Massachusetts, with venture capital from Laurance Rockefeller, Itek held contracts from the Department of Defense as late as 1966. See Francis Bello, "How to Cope with Information," Fortune, September 1960, 165;
89. "U.S. Sodium Flare Visible 700 Miles," New York Times, 18 August 1959, 8;
90. "Other Sales, Mergers," New York Times, 21 June 1960, 43;
91. "Seeburg and Itek Discuss a Merger," New York Times, 15 July 1960, 31 (quotation);
92. "Itek Announces It Lost Contract," New York Times, 13 October 1966, 68; and Haigh (n. 10 above), 35n28.
93. See a notice in Operations Research 9 (1961): 602,
94. and an advertisement in American Mathematical Monthly 68 (1961): U10.
95. Diebold, Automation (n. 12 above);
96. and John Diebold, Man and the Computer: Technology as an Agent of Social Change (New York, 1969).
97. For his praise of Wiener, see Diebold to Wiener, 6 May 1953 and 21 September 1953, WP, box 12, folders 172 and 178; for his criticism, see Automation, 151, 154, 155, 157.
98. See John Diebold, "Computers, Program Management, and Foreign Affairs," Foreign Affairs 45 (1966): 125-34.
99. John Diebold, "Application of Information Technology," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 340 (1962): 39.
100. Datamation, May 1967, 9 (advertisement);
101. and Diebold, Man and the Computer, 6 (quotation).
102. See also John Diebold, "What's Ahead in Information Technology," Harvard Business Review 43 (1965): 76-82.
103. Drucker (n. 27 above), 27. On fears of unemployment caused by automation, see Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate Over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (Baltimore, 2000), chap. 8.
104. Carl Heyel, Computers, Office Machines, and the New Information Technology (New York, 1969), 10.
105. See Samuel Person, "The Integrated Use of Data-Processing Equipment in Teaching Accounting Subjects," Accounting Review 39 (1964): 473-75;
106. Robert C. Goshay, Information Technology and the Insurance Industry: The Impact of Electronic Data Processing on Managerial Processes and Insurance Functions (Homewood, Ill., 1964);
107. Reed C. Lawlor, "Information Technology and the Law" Advances in Computers 3 (1962): 299-352; and Westin (n. 19 above).
108. Haigh (n. 10 above), 35-36.
109. Hak Chong Lee, "On Information Technology and Organizational Structure," Academy of Management Journal 7 (1964): 209-10.
110. Andrew Vazonyi, "Automated Information Systems in Planning, Control and Command," Management Science 11 (1965): B3, B7.
111. Robert V. Head, "Management Information Systems: A Critical Appraisal," Datamation 13 (1967): 27. For a reference to this article as an example of an information pyramid, see Haigh, 46.
112. Headed by philosopher Emmanuel G. Mesthene and funded by a $5 million grant from IBM, the program was founded in 1964 and ended in 1972. See George Basalla, "Addressing a Central Problem," Science 180 (1973): 582-84,
113. and Matthew H. Wisnioski, "Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology, 1957-1973" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005), 50-65.
114. Westin (n. 19 above), 1-11, 149-51; Myron E. Weiner, "Trends and Directions for Urban Information Systems," in Westin, 336-56;
115. and Harold L. Wilensky, "The Road from Information to Knowledge," in Westin, 277-86. Myron Weiner directed the Municipal Information Technology Program for urban managers at the University of Connecticut during the late 1960s.
116. Ulric Neisser, "Computers as Tools and as Metaphors," in The Social Impact of Cybernetics, ed. Charles R. Dechert (New York, 1966), 92;
117. Robert L. Pranger, "The Clinical Approach to Organizational Theory," Midwest Journal of Political Science 9 (1965): 216-17.
118. Samuel A. Miles, "An Introduction to the Vocabulary of Information Technology," Technical Communications 14 (1967): 20-24.
119. Jerome M. Clubb and Howard Allen, "Computers and Historical Studies," Journal of American History 54 (1967): 604.
120. See Jesse H. Shera and Donald B. Cleveland, "History and Foundations of Information Science," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 12 (1977): 249-75;
121. and Irene S. Farkas-Conn, From Documentation to Information Science (Westport, Conn., 1990).
122. On this ideal, see Ronald R. Kline, "Construing 'Technology' as 'Applied Science': Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880-1945," Isis 86 (1995): 194-221.
123. Robert S. Taylor, "Professional Aspects of Information Science and Technology," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 1 (1966): 17.
124. John F. Harvey, "Professional Aspects of Information Science and Technology," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 2 (1967): 419-44.
125. See Taylor, 20.
126. See John Sherrod, "National Information Issues and Trends," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 1 (1966): 337-51;
127. and William T. Knox, "The Government Makes Plans," Physics Today 19 (1966): 39-44.
128. On the cold war threat, see Bowles, "Crisis in the Information Age" (n. 13 above), chap. 7.
129. Anthony Debons and Klaus Otten, "Foundations of a Concept for an Education Program in Information Science," American Documentation 20 (1969): 346-51.
130. On Debons's cold war background, see William Aspray, "Command and Control, Documentation, and Library Science: The Origins of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 21 (1999): 4-20.
131. A search of titles of articles in American Documentation and its successor, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, from 1955 to 1969, and of index entries in Annual Review of Information Science and Technology from 1966 to 1980, revealed a single reference to information technology. It appeared in the title of a report referred to in Edwin B. Parker, "Information and Society," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 8 (1973): 345-73.
132. Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World (New York, 1998).
133. See the broad definitions in Knox, 39; and Rowena W. Swanson, "Information System Networks: Let's Profit from What We Know," in Information Retrieval: A Critical View, ed. George Schecter (Washington, D.C., 1967), 5.
134. Harold Wooster, "Information Technology and the Information Sciences - 'With Forks and Hope,'" in Electronic Information Handling, ed. Alien Kent and Orrin E. Taulbee (Washington, D.C., 1961), 279;
135. and Ralph R. Shaw, "Information Retrieval," Science 140 (1963): 609.
136. Mortimer Taube, "The Coming of Age of Information Technology," Bulletin of the American Medical Library Association 52 (1964): 120;
137. Taube's article was reprinted in The Coming Age of Information Technology, ed. Vladimir Slamecka (Bethesda, Md., 1965), 1-10. Although Slamecka dropped the first preposition "of" in adapting Taube's title to the book, he followed Taube in referring to information technology as a profession (p. v).
138. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (New York, 1997);
139. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
140. and Alfred D. Chandler Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds., A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 2000), chaps. 6-8.
141. Diebold, "Application of Information Technology" (n. 45 above), 39, 45.
142. Lawlor, for example, did use the term second industrial revolution (n. 49 above), 304.
143. Lewis C. Bohn, Information Technology in Development (Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1968), 5.
144. For an earlier example at NASA, see James E. Webb, "Decision-Making and Statistical Standards," American Statistician 19 (1965): 16.
145. Parker, "Information and Society" (n. 66 above), 347, 356-57;
146. Edwin B. Parker and Donald A. Dunn, "Information Technology: Its Social Potential," Science 176 (1972): 1,392-99;
147. and Edwin B. Parker, "Implications of New Information Technology," Public Opinion Quarterly 37 (1973-74): 593-94.
148. Later, in the early 1980s, the French government introduced a successful version of an information utility, the Minitel Videotext system. See Amy L. Fletcher, "France Enters the Information Age: A Political History of Minitel," History and Technology 18 (2002): 103-17.
149. Nicholas L. Henry, "Copyright, Public Policy, and Information Technology," Science 183 (1974): 384;
150. and Nicholas L. Henry, "The New Copyright Act, or How to Get into a Heap of Trouble without Really Trying," PS 10 (winter 1977): 6-7.
151. See also Nicholas L. Henry, "Copyright: Its Adequacy in Technological Societies," Science 186 (1974): 993-1,004; and Bohn.
152. Arthur R. Miller, "Personal Privacy in the Computer Age: The Challenge of a New Technology in an Information-Oriented Society," Michigan Law Review 67 (1969): 1,089-1,246.
153. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, "Some General Implications of the Research of the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society," Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 491;
154. and Anthony G. Oettinger and Nikki Zapol, "Will Information Technologies Help Learning?" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412 (1974): 116-26.
155. Parker, "Implications of New Information Technology," 592.
156. Donald M. Lamberton, "Preface," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412 (1974): ix;
157. Donald M. Lamberton, "National Information Policy," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412 (1974): 147-48.
158. Theodore J. Lowi, "The Third Revolution, Politics, and the Prospect for an Open Society," IEEE Transactions on Communications 23 (1975): 1,019.
159. Anatol Rapoport, "War and Peace," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412 (1974): 152.
160. For similar talk about a new industrial revolution, see Herbert A. Simon, "What Computers Mean for Man and Society," Science 195 (1977): 1,186-91.
161. Based on a search for the exact phrase "information technology" in the Cornell University Library catalog and in the JSTOR collection of journals.
162. See Philip Sadler, "Welcome Back to the 'Automation' Debate," in The Microelectronics Revolution: The Complete Guide to the New Technology and Its Impact on Society, ed. Tom Forester (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 293;
163. and Juan Rada, The Impact of MicroElectronics: A Tentative Appraisal of Information Technology (Geneva, 1980).
164. Richard L. Nolan attributes the acronym IT to Europeans; see his "Information Technology Management since 1960," in Chandler and Cortada (n. 71 above), 217.
165. Alec M. Lee, "A Tale of Two Countries: Some Systems Perspectives on Japan and the United Kingdom in the Age of Information Technology," Journal of the Operations Research Society 34 (1983): 753-63.
166. Tom Forester, ed., The Information Technology Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), xiii.
167. See the following in The Information Technology Revolution, 1985, xii. ibid.:
168. Christopher Dede, "Educational and Social Implications," 243;
169. David A. Buchanan, "Using the New Technology," 457, 465;
170. Juan Rada, "Information Technology and the Third World," 571, 573;
171. and Margaret A. Boden, "The Social Impact of Thinking Machines," 99.
172. Colin Cherry, The Age of Access: Information Technology and Social Revolution - Posthumous Papers of Colin Cherry, ed. William Edmonson (London, 1985), 12.
173. Langdon Winner, "Mythinformation," in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, 1986), 98-117;
174. and Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York, 1986),
175. For an argument that beliefs in the mythology of information helped make its claims come true, see Geoffrey Bowker, "Information Mythology: The World of/as Information," in Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, ed. Lisa Bud-Frierman (London, 1994), 231-47.
176. Capurro and Hjorland (n. 3 above), 390 (emphasis in original).
177. Kline, "What Is Information Theory a Theory Of?" (n. 14 above).
178. Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London, 1995), chap. 1.
179. See Bowles, "Crisis in the Information Age" (n. 13 above).
180. On this theme, see also Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, 1977).
181. Claude Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), chap. 1;
182. and Nicholas G. Carr, "IT Doesn't Matter," Harvard Business Review 81 (2003): 41-49.