Computers, Social Science and the Cambridge Project

Chris Fletcher

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Computers, Social Science and the Cambridge Project

In: CyberCulture Now: Social and Communication Behaviours on the Web

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Chris Fletcher

Chris Fletcher
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 125–141

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848881785_011

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This chapter will draw upon my research trip to archival sources held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prompted by an effort to critically consider what were in many ways the first cyberspaces: the time-sharing computer environments of the ARPA funded Project MAC and the schemas they established. This particular discussion concerns the Cambridge Project, a 1969 venture to develop computer aided modelling programs for socio-behavioural science championed by J.C.R. Licklider and Ithiel de Sola Pool. The Cambridge Project was the subject of a good deal of controversy at both administrative and public levels when the project’s Department of Defence funding met with the suspicion of governmentally-orientated research which characterised the late 1960s. Given that mythologies of contemporary social media have held similar suspicions regarding the freedom with which ‘personal information’ flows through and across sites and devices, with correlate suspicions of potential technologies of mass surveillance, the ‘moment’ which occurred with the Cambridge Project, seemingly forgotten given the scarcity of commentary it enjoys, is perhaps more important for our contemporary situation than its historical distance would imply. Ours is a descendent context in which entire online economies and technologies of identity depend on architectures of personal data; the ancestral interplay between socio-behavioural science and computer science we find in the Cambridge Project gives rise to discussions of the power of personal information and what it is that personal information does. A critical exploration of the Cambridge Project drawing on the traditions of continental philosophy will provoke a consideration of the history of the present moment, of our online selves and the increasing way in which we live through information.

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CyberCulture Now: Social and Communication Behaviours on the Web

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848881785

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2013

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - General
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Computers, Social Science and the Cambridge Project

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CyberCulture Now: Social and Communication Behaviours on the Web

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