Scriptnetics
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Scriptnetics is the study of manual organic data interaction for communication or control, often involving regulatory feedback, in living organisms and in machines and their combinations. The term derives its root from cybernetics (from the Greek ??????????: steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder - the same root as government) and the Latin word scriptor (writer, author or scribe) to describe scriptnetics as a subset of cybernetics that relates to the method of data input for communication or control and governance. It is a recent term that is often considered without being named in subject matters that are specializations of cybernetics under the headings of adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering.
A more philosophical definition follows from the 1956 cybernetics definition of Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, as "the art of ensuring the efficiency of action” to one for scriptnetics as “interaction for the art of ensuring the efficiency of action."
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[edit] History and Origins
Scriptnetics is related to the movement begun in the early 1970's of second-order cybernetics that distinguished themselves from the control engineering and computer science disciplines who had become fully independent within cybernetics. The remaining cybneticists felt they needed to clearly distinguish themselves by emphasizing autonomy, self-organization, cognition and the role of the observer in the modeling system. Some controversy surrounds the second-order movement because of the emphasis on the irreducible complexity of the various system-observer interactions and its ensuing subjectiveness. Second-order cybernetics may continue to be concerned with less objective and less mathematical approaches.
The development of computer sound recognition and computer graphics systems, particularly since the beginning of the millenium, including the advancement of voice and handwriting, allowed an emphasis on organic interaction to and from machines with the observer having a greater influence over the system without actually being part of the system. At the same time the observer is influenced down to the subconscious level by feedback from the machine. For example, handwriting to text predictive computer systems make the user inputing handwriting "think" the computer system is "learning" to interpret the handwriting of the user. In reality, the user is learning subconsciously through the feedback of immediate results to better form the handwriting graphics. Scriptnetics is the study and application of this recently observed interaction phenomena using empirical observations and tests.
[edit] Scope
In scholarly terms, Scriptnetics is the study of input systems or control in an abstracted sense — that is, it is not grounded in any one system but can be measured empirically to test results.
The emphasis is on the parts of a system in the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system. These relations include the transfer of information, and circular relations (feedback) that result in emergent phenomena such as self-organization, and, (expressed as a term coined by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Ricardo Uribe), autopoiesis. The main innovation of scriptnetics is the creation of a scientific discipline focused on results: an understanding of results from a negative feedback loop which minimizes the deviation between the perceived situation and the desired results.
In practical terms, scriptnetics is a re-introduction of the role of the observer as a player to establish a sub-definition of cybernetics in the control engineering and computer science disciplines rather than defining the importance of autonomy, self-organization, cognition and the role of the observer as a new broadly based disciple, second-order cybernetics. The emphasis in scriptnetics is the empirical measurement of events to determine a model that will lead to predictable results.
Examples of scriptnetics to describe the process of organic input of data into a mechanical control or computer system for interaction with that system; a computer keyboard, voice activation in phone systems, handwriting recognition or drawing on electronic pads.
[edit] References
Pangaro, Paul (1990), "Cybernetics — A Definition", Eprint.
von Foerster, Heinz (1995), "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics", Eprint.
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