COMMENTS ON “THE INVASION OF THE MIND” BY I.I. MITROFF

Abstract

Mitroff's proposal that we exercise all our wits and not just half of them, i.e. the portion presumed to reside in the left hemisphere of the brain, is indisputable. One would like to conclude from the scenario that he has drawn that (a) management information systems are not necessarily synonymous with managerial knowhow; (b) there is no magic in macro‐models; and (c) the computer, despite having achieved Man‐of‐the‐Year status on the cover of Time, cannot father a daughter (to whom marriage at one time would have assured swift ascent in a business career). But I am not sure that this is Mitroff's message nor am I clear as to what it really is, for although he starts out by agreeing with me, that society may be getting the short end of a Faustian bargain with respect to information technology, his line of argument veers off in a direction that would logically lead to a very different conclusion. If I read him correctly, he looks more to the machine than to the man in the man/machine relationship. He wants us to build better men via machine so that electronic games, Disneylands, and other such contrivances will provide us with more salubrious feedback in the way of improved information about everything from the workings of our private psyche to the running of our business.

Citation

Hoos, I.R. (1984), "COMMENTS ON “THE INVASION OF THE MIND” BY I.I. MITROFF", Office Technology and People, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 91-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb022625