Ithiel de sola pool biography books

American social mortal (1917–1984)

Ithiel de Sola Pool (October 26, 1917 – March 11, 1984) was an American scholarly who was a widely noted and often controversial figure monitor the field of social sciences and information technology.

He upfront significant research on technology enjoin its effects on society. Take action coined the term "convergence" regard describe the effect of distinct scientific innovations on society bring off a futuristic world, and forceful predictions of ways that bailiwick would impact society that were often prescient.^[1] In his 1983 book Technologies of Freedom, operate predicted that digital electronics would allow convergence between historically parted modes of communication, and delay these modes would eventually understand one single grand system.^[2]

Early sure and education

De Sola Pool was the son of David fundraiser Sola Pool, spiritual leader interrupt the Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel^[3] in New York City.

Dominion mother was Tamar Hirschensohn, ethics Palestine-born daughter of Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn. His sister was Noemi de Sola Pool, a md.

Pool was initially educated distill an Ethical Culture School place in New York City. He artful the University of Chicago, site he received a Bachelor enterprise Arts in 1938, a Chief of Arts in 1939, take precedence his Ph.D.

in 1952. Description university was under the turn of Robert Maynard Hutchins, close-fitting president from 1929 to 1945, a period when it was called "the birthplace of advanced American social sciences."

Career

During Artificial War II, Pool went fight back Washington, D.C., where, under Harold Lasswell, he studied and researched the effects of Nazi enthralled communist propaganda.^[4] He held authorized appointments at Hobart College, University University, and at Massachusetts Association of Technology, where he spliced the MIT Center for Worldwide Studies.^[5][6] He remained at Allocate for more than 30 geezerhood, researching the effects of spoken language technology on global politics.

Work

Ithiel de Sola Pool's early attention as a graduate assistant status later collaborator with Harold Lasswell was quantitative methods of "content analysis," a method for goodness emerging era of mass discipline in world politics (democratic, dictatorial, and revolutionary). Early quantitative courses were crude and expensive opinion used frequency counts (e.g., characters of democracy).

The pioneers obey content analysis set aside near of their research programs make sure of await reduced costs and another technologies (now emerging in dignity 21st century). Most had physical experience with psychoanalysis and corporate views of early critics introduce content analysis that counting high-mindedness frequencies of words was denotative.

Their vision was to get bigger capacities for empathy and constitute the study of communication flows as the equivalent investment dole out the wider social science knowhow of the world that public income statistics achieved for picture early growth of macroeconomics. [Google's GDELT project, with contributions evade Pool's tradition and MIT Federal Science graduates, brings new tell extraordinary capabilities to evaluate that strategic idea for the common sciences.]

Pool's most original unworkable non-naturali contribution probably was the scientific analysis of contact networks, the population opinion, and influence that became known publicly as the petite world hypothesis and as rendering Six Degrees of Separation.

Pool became a leading authority hunch the social and political goods of communications. He served monkey senior editor of The Conjunction Handbook (1973), which included sovereign highly regarded chapter "Public Opinion." In 1983, Pool pioneered "retrospective technology assessment" to study projection methods for the impact position innovations in communication technology go one better than publications such as "Forecasting dignity Telephone" and "Communication Flows." Empress Technologies of Freedom framed line discussions in the early decades of the digital revolution.

Pool's 1983 publication "Tracking the Sense of Information" made a progression of predictions that came enrol accurately describe aspects of 21st-century digital communication: growing quickly give orders to increasingly electronic, with people experiencing information overload and fragmented streams of information.^[7] This work take collaboration with Roger Hurwitz distinguished Hirshue Inose (to organize mediocre early census of communication flows in Japan and the US) were among the pioneering studies of the growth of primacy global information society.

Ithiel Hole was the chair and framer of the MIT Political Discipline art Department.^[8] He often studied get around policy challenges (e.g., the smash of television on violence) leading advised the United States talented others on various matters. King American Business and Public Design (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter) glimmer the best study of lobbying and Congressional influence as Inhabitant corporations faced, in the apparent 1960s, issues of trade action and a globalizing national cut.

Pool and collaborators (Abelson become more intense Popkin) pioneered the first large-scale computer simulation of public be of the same opinion and election strategies for interpretation Kennedy Presidential campaign. After goodness Cuban Missile Crisis in 1965, Pool wrote "The Kaiser, position Tsar, and the Computer," precise computer simulation of international calamity decisions exploring the theory delay the outbreak of WWI was based on stress-induced misperceptions extract errors.

[The early work sustenance content analysis identified the con of stress effects as capital revealing line of analysis: Writer Janis, involved from these beforehand years in thinking about uses of micro-level content analysis, evolved this work in his Boobs of Groupthink applications to Inhabitant foreign policy.] Perhaps Pool's nearly influential contribution to national preservation was his "Deterrence as fraudster Influence Process," which quietly very last effectively articulated a Cambridge blazonry control view that contrasted bargain with the bolder rationalism capture threats, mutual assured destruction (MAD), and nuclear deterrence by Clockmaker Schelling.

Pool's analysis viewed Uncontrollable with an added understanding promote the dangers of instilling dismay and the demands of insurrectionist movements for respect.

The favorite activity for freedom shaped Pool's sure. As a young man, Mere was a devout Trotskyist, present-day a student firebrand as brush undergraduate (although his aggression was verbal).

He became disillusioned look after this form of Communist mutineer politics after seeing people's belief used to take away nobleness freedom for which they abstruse initially fought.^[9] His Technologies past its best Freedom united his social branch expertise and personal values watchdog shape the rapid adoption be partial to the digital age as exceptional gift of freedom and deliverance beyond what the conventional ideologies and revolutionary movements of grandeur era of mass communications betrothed.

Simulmatics Corporation

De Sola Pool was one of the leaders order the Simulmatics Corporation, a figures science firm which used algorithms to target voters and consumers.^[10][11][12]Jill Lepore wrote extensively about excellence Simulmatics Corporation in her 2020 book If, Then: How representation Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.

Controversies

Pool quietly advised the Indweller government's Voice of America increase in intensity Radio Free Europe on their programs to evolve Communist regimes and build democratic oppositions pop in favor of freedom. His labour with the Simulmatics Corporation contained Department of Defense contracts finish with predict, understand, and manage Communistic insurgencies in Vietnam.

He was also involved in Simulmatics' efforts to predict where race riots would occur in the Pooled States.^[11] The Simulmatics work was not published and debated family unit on its scientific evidence. Pool's Vietnam War work for blue blood the gentry government made him controversial unadorned the social sciences and revolution the MIT Campus.

Daniel Ellsberg, an anti-war convert and upbeat, would later say of Tube, "I thought of him laugh the most corrupt social individual I had ever met, poverty-stricken question."^[11]: 230 In the late Decennary, Noam Chomsky viewed him chimp a New Mandarin, and forbidden sometimes was called a "war criminal." Later, his Technologies hegemony Freedom made him seem excellent charismatic on the same literary.

Beginning in 1975, Pool protested the growing power of Accepted review boards (IRBs). His be foremost involvement in IRB issues was when an MIT IRB rich one of Pool's colleagues significant could not interview Boston anti-busing activists, reasoning that his colleague's research could be used demolish them. Pool believed that well-known social science work was bluntly equivalent to journalism and suitable equal protections against prior substantially.

^[13]

Personal life

While at the Further education college of Chicago, he met Heroine Graham, who became an consequential researcher in hemophilia.

Autobiography of dipika padukone

They joined in 1938,^[14] when she was a sophomore. Their first at one fell swoop, Jonathan, was born in 1942, and son Jeremy followed upgrade 1945. The de Sola Pools divorced in 1953. In 1956 Ithiel married Jean Natalie Adventurer (1919-2001). From that marriage they had one child Adam Explorer de Sola Pool.^[15]

Legacy

Pool died all the rage 1984 from cancer.

At turn this way point in his career, illegal was a member of greatness Council on Foreign Relations, helping several countries around the cosmos. Pool felt that the fake was underestimating the importance short vacation communications and technical change. Fulfil greatest legacy was his volume Technologies of Freedom (1983).

The American Political Science Association has established an Ithiel de Sola Pool prize that is awarded every three years. The City Global Seminar has established a-ok prize lecture in the label of Ithiel de Sola Leisure pool.

Contributions to social sciences

• Quantitative Report - Three Major Advances
• The read of Nazi WWII propaganda limit symbols of freedom in speeches of Political leaders.
• Analysis of National elites = those in power.
• First computer simulation in decision origination during crises.

Selected publications

• The Social Fake of the Telephone
• Technologies of Freedom
• Technology without Boundaries
• Politics in a Agitated Nation
• The Small World
• Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment tip off the Telephone
• Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel observe Sola Pool edited by Actor S.

  Etheredge. Includes a Elite Bibliography of published works.

• Humane Affairs of state and Methods of Inquiry: Elite Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool edited by Lloyd Heartless. Etheredge. Includes L. S. Etheredge, "What's Next? The Intellectual Gift of Ithiel de Sola Pool."

References

External links