On Aerial Perspective, Socio-Technical Systems, and Interdisciplinarity: Reading Modernism Alongside Cybernetics

Abstract

I recently had the pleasure of speaking about my work on the literary and cultural history of cybernetics during a workshop on “Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organization” (SaSSO) at the 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2023), in Toronto, Ontario [1] . Although the venue might seem an odd fit for an English professor who studies experimental early 20th-century (i.e., “modernist”) authors like Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, this workshop, in fact, represented an ideal opportunity. My research focuses on literature’s relationship to emerging technological developments; more specifically, I explore how modernist writers were developing strategies, in their literary texts, to help readers acknowledge and learn how to navigate their increasingly information-saturated world. As I frame it, these modernists aim to cultivate in readers the capacity to “ think cybernetically ”—that is, to develop strategies for responding in creative and generative ways to the 20th century’s complex sociocultural (and socio-technical) environment [2, p. 5] . These ideas and questions happened to align beautifully with the SaSSO workshop theme, given its emphasis on issues related to sustainability and scalability and its systems-level perspective on understanding the complex networks that shape humans’ relationships with one another, the world, and technological tools. 1 I hope that they will also appeal to and resonate with readers of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine