Thoughts on Who Knows What

This day was another HIST day, not that there’s anything wrong with that, I find it fascinating. We talked a lot about Vannevar Bush’s idea of a memex. A desk that can only be explained as the same concept as the internet— minus the online wifi part. The memex was a way of forging one’s own path in researching. You’d be able to access all your information in one place as well as notes you made, and it all fit very well in your traditional desk. Now, Bush’s really complex idea just couldn’t quite be achieved with how far along technology was in his day. While Bush never managed to see his memex come to fruition, he did pave the way for communicative and research development.

He predicted so many things— and I mean so many; kindles, the internet, cellphones, VR headsets, GoPros, the lot and so much more. What I found most interesting were his visions for them. When I say Bush predicted the aforementioned technology, he predicted the concepts, ideas and functionalities of them, not their actual form or what they looked like. Bush’s technology, I can only imagine, would have looked incredibly steampunk…. I think that’s awesome. I love steam punk style so I’m gonna add pictures in case anyone doesn’t know what “steampunk” is and just because I like it, this is my blog and I can.

What I imagine the memex would look like

Bush’s GoPro

(of course you can’t have steam punk without the hat or goggles)

Steampunk is basically fusing technology with industrial era clothing or life, it’s a subculture of people I think fits perfectly for Bush’s ideas. The main thing I took away from our lesson was, however, the way Bush looked at the future. It left me wanting to take time and think about advancements and technology I can imagine in the future. All inventions and all ideas are derived from what we already know or have available to us. We as a species are incapable of seeing into the future. If we could, everything would have been discovered or invented already. What Bush did was take what he know about knowledge, information and research and reshape it into a more effective process. I reflected on what we know/have now and Bush’s idea for his memex. I think the modern era version of a memex is what we see in books and movies. Below are my notes from class, they describe it better since it was in the moment:

• We talked about how research is done and that the internet is the solution… I was thinking it can go further – like the desks used in Ender’s Game that’s what they would look like. And this “dex” to use Bush’s work would be touch screen. Each addition to the thread of thought is like a little hexagonal blurb. You draw lines and connect them, you make more hexagons with writing, these hexagons could have anything (articles, links, photos, videos, poems, whatever is useful to your research. That would be the ultimate “dex”
  • In the future someone might see my idea and think of a better way to make a dex using technology they have and forces that we presently are unable to.

The fact that the authors like Orson Scott Card, and others who write dystopian novels, have already come up with this idea means it isn’t an original though. It’s funny to me how authors would write about these “dex”s that would undermine their being. It’s like Professor O’Malley mentioned in class, Bush (also Berners-Lee who we hadn’t talked about yet) practically made books extinct. Why read someone else’s train of thought, their biases, when you can research and compile you own? This memex would have been the first thing on a long road to their demise. That being said, I think books will never die. That’s because they’re more then just research and information, they’re also stories; and there’s no other solid source of stories.