The module will be entirely Distance Learning. It will be delivered primarily via Blackboard, with additional use made of Teams and other platforms where appropriate. The module tutor will provide reading and/or other material for students to address, tutor notes, and usually supplementary guidance in the form of a video or audio file. Students will be expected to read the texts set week by week, watch or listen to any supplementary material, undertake any tasks proposed by the tutor, and engage with the Discussion Board designated for the module. The emphasis will be on understanding key ideas and connecting them with real world problems. In addition to the Discussion Board, students will complete elements of formative assessment, and where appropriate these will contribute to a collective set of student-generated resources for the module (e.g. book reviews, collections of source material, analyses of significant passages of text) in order to encourage a sense of collective learning through research.

Blackboard
Digital Services
Library.

The module will examine models of information, including ideas in information theory, cybernetics, and conceptions of information in science. In technological terms, information is the basis of the digital age, that has transformed human life in ways we are yet fully to discover: sociological, political and philosophical thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann, Antonio Negri, Bernard Stiegler, and Michel Serres have explored the question extensively, reaching a striking variety of conclusions. In scientific terms, information, through its close association with thermodynamics, is taken to be the basic ‘stuff’ of space and time. The module will introduce the basic principles of information theory and its development in cybernetics and will go on to examine different interpretations of information and cybernetics, and the approaches to thinking and problem-solving to which they give rise. Consideration will be given to the ethical and political issues, and to questions such as memory, imagination , and the nature of digital objects. The thinkers whose work is covered may include Norbert Wiener, Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler.

Assessment 1. Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4.

Assessment 2. Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 3.

Demonstrate a systematic understanding of competing accounts of information and cybernetics.

Knowledge and Understanding.
Learning.

Demonstrate a critical grasp of the significance of competing accounts of information and cybernetics for the way we understand the digital age today. Contemporary problems.

Knowledge and Understanding.
Learning.

Engage critically in discussions relating to information and communication.

Analysis.
Reflection.

Think and communicate critically and with clarity about complex problems.
Communication.
Reflection.

More than ever, our world is made up of information and the way information is organised. But do we really know what information is and the way that it shapes everything who we are and what we do? The module will introduce the basic principles of information theory and its development in cybernetics and will go on to examine different interpretations of information and cybernetics, and the approaches to thinking and problem-solving to which they give rise. Consideration will be given to

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, 59, 3–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828

Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 10, no. 4 (1953): 261–281.

Yuk Hui, “Chapter 3:”in On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minnesota: Minnesota Press, 2016), 109–149.

Floridi, Luciano ‘What is the Philosophy of Information?’ Metaphilosophy, Vol. 33, No. 1/2 (January 2002), pp. 123-145.

Geoghegan, Bernard. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2000)

Malaspina, Cécile “Part 1: Concepts: Information Entropy, Negentropy, Noise” in The Epistemology of Noise, 15-90

Oyama, Susan. The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Duke University Press, 2000)

Ruyer, Raymond ‘Introduction’ to Cybernetics and the Origin of Information (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Serres, Michel ‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory and Thermodynamics’ in Harari, Josué V and Bell, David F (eds) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.