3333 Austria, 20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research

20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, to be held at the University of Vienna Tuesday 6 to Friday 9 April, 2010.

I give a short description of the role and position of symposium C:

Symposium C explores what is often called second order cybernetics. In 1968, Margaret Mead, one of the Macy Group that included Norbert Wiener—who in 1948 wrote the seminal and unifying text «Cybernetics»—suggested that the American Society for Cybernetics should consider the way it wished to behave as a society in the light of understandings developed in cybernetics itself: the society for cybernetics should itself be subject to cybernetic analysis and development. This reflexive approach became generalised into what Heinz von Foerster called Second Order Cybernetics, cybernetics where the nature of the circularity in systems is taken seriously (eg, the controlling element of a system is itself controlled by the remainder of the system, which it is controlling!).

The second order cybernetic approach is at the heart of understandings of interaction, conversation and the creating of the new, all of which are central to understandings of the behaviour of humans together, and growing in importance in research. In second order cybernetics, the observer is recognised as present: Foerster described it as the cybernetics of observing (as opposed to observed) systems. Some believe that it returns to the basic understandings that drove the original formation of cybernetics, and is close to what many of the early cyberneticians, including Bateson, Mead and Wiener, and von Foerster, Pask and Ashby had in mind: in effect, that all cybernetics is second order, in origin.

Key dates are:
paper submission: November 10 2009
notification of acceptance: December 15 2009
final papers: 5 February 2010

You can find more details of the conference at http://www.osgk.ac.at/emcsr/

There have been a number of public announcements. If you have already been informed of this conference, I apologise for any cross posting!

Please feel free to email me for further discussion, if you wish (but note that I intend to take an email break shortly, so please leave this until September).

Best Wishes

Ranulph Glanville