Alloway was influenced by, the overlapping clusters of Information Theory, communications, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. Probably the single most important book in shaping his ideas, and one he returned to regularly throughout his career, was Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, published in 1950. Alloway saw in Wiener's popularized Information Theory a way of defining the world, including art, in terms of what he described as “a network of available messages (a message being a form of pattern or organization)” that was fundamentally “non-hierarchic.” Furthermore, in his declaration that “To live effectively is to live with adequate information,” Wiener represented an attitude to 1950s’ modernity to which Alloway wholeheartedly subscribed. Alloway was also influenced by Wilbur Schramm's 1954 edited book on The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. Schramm provided a layperson's approach to “how the communication process works, how attention is gained, how meaning is transferred from one subjective field to another, how opinions and attitudes are created or modified, and how group memberships, role concepts, and social structure are related to the process.” Schramm dealt effectively with key Information Theory terms such as source, encoder, signal, decoder, destination, inferential feedback, and sign vehicles, and provided diagrams to help explain the communication process.

Alloway also derived knowledge from magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction that introduced its readers to, for example, cybernetics. In 1956 he praised the progressivism of some science fiction literature, pointing out that “There are plenty of people who still do not know what [cybernetics]… is but science fiction readers knew years ago, from articles, adventure stories, and idea stories based on the new science.” Through the same channel, in this case A.E. van Vogt's 1948 The World of Null-A (serialized in 1945), Alloway had been introduced to A.C. Korzbski's Science and Sanity: an introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933). The 800-page book had profound implications for how we make sense of knowledge and experience, but it was typical of Alloway that he took great pleasure “in the notion of getting [these ideas] from slightly disreputable science fiction…,” thus maintaining the clear distinction between being serious and being earnest.