| Summary: | Similar shifts can be seen in the use of cybernetic modelling across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. This article will categorize these shifts in terms of three historical phases: (1) modern cybernetics, focused on digital hierarchical systems, which reached its high point in the late 1960s; (2) transitional postmodern cybernetics, focused on analogue decentralized systems, which started in the late 1970s; and (3) stable postmodern cybernetics, based on a synthesis between the analogue/digital and centralized/decentralized oppositions, which started in the late 1980s. While the shifts themselves can be explained by internalist narratives, the ways in which youth subculture closely parallels these changes suggests that there are causal links between cybernetics and popular culture which work in both directions.
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