Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Vannevar Bush article
Sorry this is so late! Anyway, I found Vannevar Bush's article quite intriguing, particularily his idea of the "memex". Given today's technological advancements, his proposal seems decidedly absurd. According to Wikipedia "the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not understand information science, or microfilm very well". I was hoping to get some feedback on this issue: what about the memex struck you as probably not very well adapted to the way that people use information? What structural errors did this particular, though hypothetical advancement have, in your opinion, given the ways you use technology? Also, it has been written that Vannevar didn't link up with the library.. where we might think his invention might have a home. How often do you think this happens, how many inventions that may have helped the library just pass on by because of perceptions about the library as an institution.. what might these perceptions be? Lack of funding, lack of use for technology?
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I had the opposite reaction to the Bush essay. It made me suspicious of what the U.S. government was developing or what technologies were on the cusp of development in the 1940s. Of course, on the surface, Bush's essay seems pretty silly now. But I thought his text contained some eery (yet vague) foreshadowing of technologies that have actually come into being, like digital photography, web crawlers/spiders, keyword searching, PDAs, etc.
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