Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
loop between government initiatives and their popular reception in various
ways, and I want to examine just one of these.
On Goals
In March 1972 . . . we addressed the basic issue of the organization of the state
that is not economic but societary. . . . I wrote a second paper about a project
to examine:
“the systems dynamics
of the interaction
between government and people
in the light of newly available technology
such as TV
and discoveries in the realm
of psycho-cybernetics”
(Beer 1981, 278)
There were, of course, many channels by which the Chilean government
could communicate with the Chilean population at large and vice versa. But
the reference to TV immediately suggests an asymmetry. Governments could
transmit information over the television in great detail and length—a high-
variety channel, in the language of information theory. The people, in con-
trast, could not reply via the TV at all—an exceedingly low-variety channel.
Of course, the people could communicate via other channels, such as forming
political parties and voting in elections, but Beer felt that it was necessary to
do something to increase the information flow from people to government
if a homeostatic equilibrium was to be achieved. He also, as usual, felt that
the channel from people to government should be a real-time one, so that
the latter could react to how the former felt today rather than last week or
last month or last year.
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The solution Beer proposed, novel and endearing, is
shown in figure 6.15. The aim here was to supplement the economic algedonic
feedback of the VSM with social feedback. TV viewers, for example, would
be provided with very simple “algedonic meters” of the form shown in the
lower left of figure 6.15. These would be simple semicircular devices in which
a partition could be rotated clockwise (toward “happy”) or counterclockwise
(“unhappy”) in response to whatever was happening before them—a televised
political speech, say. Some simple wiring arrangements would aggregate
