Vannevar Bush (1945, July). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly; Volume 176, No. 1; pages 101-108. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
I must admit that I've read and discussed this article by Bush several times - one of the hazards of getting an MS and a Ph.D. in library and information science, I suppose. Most conversations center around the memex and Bush's foresight into what we now refer to as the Web. In an article by Rob Kling (1994) titled, "Reading 'All About' Computerization: How Genre Conventions Shape Non-Fiction Social Analysis" (http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/archive/kling/read94a.html), he categorizes the memex as "utopian imagery" - a vision that is inadequate in the way it characterizes "technologies, people, and social life." However, Bush's prediction is amazing in its own right, but as Kling (1994) suggests, the fact that the image that was dominating scientific thought and writing at the time "As We May Think" was drafted and published was the high speed calculation of numerical rather than textual data.
The one idea that really resonated for me in this reading of the article and surpassed the appeal of the memex is sense of information overload - "that there is a growing mountain of research" that causes us to be "bogged down today." What would Bush think about the amount of information we are bombarded with on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis in the 21st century? Regardless, while I was reading this article, I had to stop and remind myself that Bush wrote this piece in 1945. I had a similar experience in reading the piece, On Liberty (section III - http://www.bartleby.com/130/3.html), which was published in 1859, yet had a very contemporary tone.
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1 comment:
Yes, the shear amount of information is perhaps a phase we are going through and intelligent agents and brain chips (and vacations) will take care of the rest.
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