ABSTRACT
The information society has always been with us, as argued by Bissell in Chapter 3 of this book. Information, through its changing forms and media, has been always been a guiding principle for the organisation of society and for many different forms of scientifi c understanding. Nonetheless, a key development in the centrality of information to society occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the birth of the fi eld of cybernetics.
