Memex Commentary

For this week’s assignment, we were instructed to read two articles by Vannevar Bush, one recap of a symposium on Bush’s work, and one piece of commentary found through our own Google search. I chose to write about a blog post by Jake Soller discussing the writings of Bush.

In his 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific industrialization toward mass destruction, rather than mass understanding. He creates the concept of a “memex”, a data collection machine that would help researchers search, record, analyze, and communicate information and make knowledge more accessible. 

Soller’s response to “As We May Think” claims that Bush predicts the availability, speed and structure of the modern day computer and Internet and the ease of obtaining knowledge through search engines. One idea I find really interesting in Soller’s article is his analysis of Bush’s idea of a “bridge between disciplines”, i.e. the importance of speed of availability along with the importance of combining all information available, or “compressing” the ideas into a single knowledge-base. This is an exceptional way to describe the practicality of search engines such as Google (or, as Soller analyzes, Wikipedia). By simply searching one topic on the internet, we are able to look at all pertainable information in one place, speeding up the process of research by not having to sift through research to find the important pieces. 

Though Soller makes many excellent point on the comparison of Bush’s “memex” and the internet today, one thing I think he was incorrect in stating was that “The one thing Vannevar Bush may have been wrong about comes when he says that the memex would ‘create a new profession of trail blazers.’” The internet has allowed for innovators like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg to trail blaze society and create things that nobody could have ever imagined would exist, for better or for worse, and made fortunes off their trailblazing discoveries. Thus, Bush was spot on in his prediction.

 http://jfs7.commons.yale.edu/2008/09/09/vannevar-bush-response/