Exercise 6: Analysing
Vannevar Bush's vision. By Stephanie Bell.
"As we may think". (Published for the public in
1945).
(My comments in each section are in red
italics.)
Contents:
Sections:
Introduction
Bush outlines his vision of
the future technological advances. He describes a machine that could be
developed to help the human mind instead of helping us practically like
other inventions of which he gives examples including: "Microscopes
that sharpen the eye". He also asks what the physicists will
concentrate on next (instead of war-based inventions), "as peace
approaches" he says.
I think that Bush is trying to justify his
vision to the reader and to show where his expectations have developed
from.
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Section
1: What
we have now and what we need.
Bush writes
about how science has moved forward with developments that allow us to
perform practical tasks with ease. He gives examples of this: "They
have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter, his security".
He then explains what he thinks would be useful to us mentally to deal
with all the information we have to remember. He finishes the section with
examples of devices that are "cheap" and yet
"complex".
He seems to me to be giving the reader a
way of believing that his vision is practically possible without costing a
fortune, especially when he says: "Something is bound to come out of
it".
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Section
2: How
technologies have advanced and will further.
Bush describes how
technologies have improved and how/why he thinks they will get even
better. He then goes on to say how vast amounts of information, (e.g.
"Encyclopaedia Britannica", he says) could be compressed into
the size of "a matchbox". He hints at the prospect of written
information like books, newspapers, advertising etc. being not only
compressed and stored but being made easily accessible to the reader. He
says that costs of paper and ink would be greatly reduced if these were
all published on machines.
To me, this is the first part in the
article that I can see similarities between Bush's ideas and the World
Wide Web today which is a vast source of information including the types
of written material Bush has mentioned.
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Section
3: Difficulties
in recording arithmetical information.
Bush writes
about his ideas of how arithmetical computation could be made easier using
"electrical" (instead of mechanical) machines that will store
data and will be used by many people at a time.
Another similarity here to the WWW.
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Section
4: Reasons
for the inevitable advance.
The author gives a number of
reasons why he thinks that mathematical inventions will be made to do more
complex tasks. He says: "A mathematician is not a man who can readily
manipulate figures; often he cannot... a man of intuitive judgment in the
choice of the manipulative process he employs". He says that we
should have a mechanism that we can rely on to do this for us in the
background like "under the hood" in the case of a car.
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Section
5: Making
it easier to find information.
"There may be millions
of fine thoughts and the account of the experience on which they are
based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architecture form; but
if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his
syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene". Bush
says that in the future we may be able speak to a machine to obtain
information instead of searching through hoards of material to find it.
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I find that from this
section onwards, the article increases my interest extremely as Bush's
visions show many similarities to the World Wide Web.
Section 6:
Description of possible
future device that Bush calls the "memex".
Bush writes
about the difficulties of finding information: "Artificiality of
systems of indexing, filed alphabetically or numerically" he says.
Information can only be found by following a certain path. "The human
mind does not work that way. It operates by association with one item in
it's grasp, it snaps instantly to the next which is suggested by the
association of thoughts with some intricate web of trails that are not
frequently followed are prone to fade".
"Web of trails" was uncannily
similar to how the World Wide Web works in my opinion.
He writes about a future
device that he calls the " memex". He says the memex will be a
desk with a screen for "convenient reading", a keyboard, buttons
and levers. He describes how written material may not always need to be
typed in manually but "photographed" in order for it to be
stored in the memex.
This sounds like a scanner of today.
Bush also writes about a
lever that could be used so that pages of material could be viewed very
quickly up to 100 pages at a time to ease searching time.
'Scrolling' is the word I think he is
looking for!
"A special button
transfers the user immediately to the first page of the index" he
says.
I am finding this article increasingly surprising. It sounds like he is
describing a button on a website that links to the homepage!
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Section
7: Trails
of information.
The author describes how the
user would work the memex. He says the user will build a trail with items
of information all linked to one another by the use of hidden code. He
talks about a button that could be tapped to recall another page.
This all sounds like links and 'back'
buttons on websites and browsers.
"Any item can be
joined into numerous trails", Bush says.
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Section
8: How
the "memex" could be used by professionals and what this could
mean.
Bush talks about how professionals including lawyers, physicians and
historians could have access to endless amounts of information they need
to hand. He talks of "A new profession of trail-blazers, those who
find delight in the task of establishing trails through the enormous mass
of the common record".
This sounds like web designers and search
engine authors.
At the end of this
section, (and the end of this article) Bush explains to the reader why he
thinks that this device, (the memex) will be useful to them. He says that
it would be useful for information to be stored and retrieved easily from
something else other than the limitations of our memories.
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My
thoughts.
This article made me wonder what Bush
would think if he could see technology as it is today, especially the WWW.
It is obvious to me that his visions definately influenced the makers of
the internet. I felt quite surprised at how accurate his vision was about
the usefulness of a machine like his "memex", at a time when the
Internet wasn't heard of. I wonder who (if anyone) laughed at Bush's
visions of the future when this article was first published. What would
they say?
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