Macy Meetings

Inaugural Macy Conference entitled "Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems."

Events and Activities - - Notes and Comments 1st Conference

8 - 9 March 1946

New York City See: http://fido.rockymedia.net/anthro/arturo.pdf

Anthropologists have been planning/preparing for this since 1941 The Macy meetings.

A short history: Anthropologists and scientists have actually been discussing humans and technology since 1941. Margaret Mead and others such as the founder of cybernetics were at these meetings. The participants knew that technology would increasingly become intertwined with humanity, and so it was very important to discuss this. These meetings lasted for a decade, and occurred yearly. They were called the Macy Meetings. past applications: .reproductive technology .the human genome project .cancer research .immunologcal science .brain imaging practices .genetics clinics .artificial intelligence and expert systems .science and Marfan’s syndrome Cyborg anthropology launched as a subdiscipline of the anthropology of science at AAA in 1992 Nothing was happening with the discipline, and nothing had happened in a long time. I decided to apply it to the web.

Maggie:  What's AAA?
me:  American Anthropological Association
Maggie:  ok

In the early 90's Donna Haraway proposed what she termed a "cyborg anthropology" to study the relation between the machine and the human, and she adds that it should proceed by "provocatively" reconceiving "the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines. But Haraway wasn't the first to discuss Cyborg Anthropology. In fact, concepts of human and technological interaction have been seriously examined by anthropologists since 1942, with the initial focus being the use and effects of feedback. These discussions led to the Macy Conferences in the 1940's and 50's. These were no ordinary conferences. They were attended by academic and technological luminaries such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner, inventor of the field of Cybernetics.

During the Macy Meetings (there's a great analysis and history of them in the book How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles) homeostasis was was a lens for which to understand cyborgs and cybernetics. Andrew Warner suggests extending this approach to today - in effect extending the Macy Meetings. If we were to do that we might be able to make serious headway into a better definition and proper domain of cyborgs. If the topic is already spurring this much discussion through asychronous and sychronously connected virtual space the imagine what we could do in reality.

The Macy Meetings were an early attempt at this, and they are overdue. I think here we may be looking at the 4th wave of cybernetics and a revision on how things are defined with respect to humans and technologies.