Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations. Contrary to popular misconception, cybernetics is not about computers so much as computers are about cybernetics. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks.

Cybernetics takes as its domain the design or discovery and application of principles of regulation and communication. Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask "what is this thing?" but "what does it do?" and "what can it do?" Because numerous systems in the living, social and technological world may be understood in this way, cybernetics cuts across many traditional disciplinary boundaries. The concepts which cyberneticians develop thus form a metadisciplinary language by which we may better understand and modify our world.

Definitions and descriptions

"a science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control"- A.N. Kolmogorov

"Cybernetique = the art of growing"- A.M. Ampere

"the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine"- Norbert Wiener

"the art of securing efficient operation"- L. Couffignal

"a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information"- Gregory Bateson

"the science of effective organization"- Stafford Beer

"the art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors"- Gordon Pask

"should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity"- Heinz von Foerster

"a way of thinking"- Ernst von Glasersfeld

"the science and art of understanding"- Humberto Maturana

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