Pask's Conversation Theory illustration.
Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.Norbert Wiener added: "Information is information, not matter or energy".155
Ross Ashby defined it as: "the art of steermanship... co-ordination, regulation and control will be itsthemes, for these are of the greatest biological and practical interest... it treats, not things but ways ofbehaving. It does not ask “what is this thing?” but “what does itdo?” Ashby continued:
- "Cybernetics stands to the real machine—electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic—much as geometry stands to a real object in our terrestrial space".