Communication and control theory, or the science of regulatory feedback, as developed by Norbert Weiner in his Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and machine, 1948.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems such as a regulated steam engine and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).