cybernetics [1948] In 1948 the American mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote ‘We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics.’ He based the word on Greek kybernetes ‘steersman’. He was not quite as original as we might think as the word cybernétique had been used for the art of governing exactly 110 years earlier in France. The word introduced cyber- as a combining form giving us a whole range of new words from the cyberspace [1982] used by computers to the more exotic cyberpunk genre of science fiction [1983], and cybersex [1991].