Interview with Klaus Krippendorff, April 12, 2017 (Session Four)

The session focuses on Krippendorff’s lifelong engagement with cybernetics, beginning with his exposure to ideas at Ulm through to his 1980s turn to second-order, social constructionist cybernetics. He revisits his graduate school encounters with Rosh Ashby, and his ongoing importance for his (Krippendorff’s) thought. His involvement in cybernetics-related conferences and scholarly societies, like the American Society for Cybernetics and the Society for General Systems Research, are recounted. Considerable attention is paid to Krippendorff’s organization of a 1974 Annenberg School of Communications conference, on Communication and Control in Social Processes, and the 1979 book that emerged from the conference. Krippendorff traces his constructionist turn to Margaret Mead’s paper at the 1967 Gaithersburg American Society for Cybernetics gathering, though he explains that his full engagement with what he called the cybernetics of cybernetics occurred in the early 1980s. His Annenberg teaching on cybernetics-related themes is discussed. Krippendorff describes the cybernetics implications for communication theory and ethics, through to publications appearing in the late 2000s.