2.3 Cultural context of Today's Systems

It is hard to see how humankind can cooperate and cope effectively with global ecological and economic challenges, if basic beliefs, values and attitudes lack harmony and mutual understanding. Thus, this session invites papers that use cybernetic methodologies and concepts to provide understandings of cultural transmissions, conflicts and transformations. Here, by ‘culture’ is meant the attitudes and values, often tacit, of a particular collective or community as expressed in individual behaviours, social interactions and the production of artefacts in the broadest sense (encompassing spoken and written texts and other symbolic forms, and found or constructed concrete objects).

Culture and systems with a history help giving more emphasis to developing cybernetic understandings of cultural transitions, transformations and conflicts. It is hard to see how humankind can cooperate and cope effectively with global ecological and economic challenges, if basic beliefs, values and attitudes lack harmony and understanding.

Coordinators

Discussion points

Conceptions and definitions of culture from a cybernetics perspective.
Cybernetically framed case studies of cultural transmissions and transformations, including historical examples and the roles of mass media, the Internet and social media.
Cybernetic understandings of the relations between culture and ‘personality’ and other individual differences.
Cybernetic understandings of the interactions between different cultures, including studies and commentaries on what some authorities refer to as the ‘clash of civilisations’ and others as ‘intercultural conversations’.
Using cybernetic understandings of complex systems to change culturally transmitted attitudes and behaviour (for example, in: counterterrorism, the rehabilitation of criminals, countering alienation and addressing problems of mental health).

2.3 Cultural context of Today's Systems

Coordinators

Discussion points

Bernard Scott

Tatiana Medvedeva