For God's Sake, Margaret
Stuart Brand,
Oikos,
May 12, 2009
Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and and Stuart Brand on cybernetics, system, networks, and art. Here's Mead: "The thing that cybernetics made the most difference to me, aside from all the things that you know, in the social organisation field, was the interaction between the mother and child. There had been too much emphasis that there were temperamental differences among children, so that you responded differently to a hyperactive baby than you did to a quiet baby. But the extent to which there was a system in which the mother was dependent on what the child had learned as the stimulus for the next position wasn't well articulated until we got the cybernetics conferences going." Which raises, for me, the question: would you treat every baby the same? What sort of terrifying sort of Ayn Rand reality would that be? More Mead: "Americans are always solving problems piece-meal. They're always solving them de nouveau and artificially because they're all newcomers and they don't have decisions grounded in a culture." CF. George Lakoff.
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