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Monday, October 20, 2014

Foreseeing the Future: The Legacy of Vannevar Bush

In the article, Foreseeing the Future: The Legacy of Vannevar Bush, the author Erine Malone highlights the writings of Bush and connects them to a modern day Memex-like creation. In Bush’s articles he discusses the ideas of linking similar information together, forming trails of related information, storing information, sharing information, and easily accessing that information. The ultimate goal of Bush was to organize the massive amount of information being generated today. It is important to note that all of these ideas were created long before the rise of the internet; thus, Bush is often credited for thinking of hypertext.  Erine Malone connects Bush’s idea of Memex to a modern day Memex-like creation: Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online webpage used for sharing information with interested users. This information often consists of several hyperlinks that provide the user with more information to specific topics within said article (essentially Bush’s idea of “linking” similar information together). Furthermore, this information is easily shared and edited by its viewers. This idea supports Bush’s Memex because he also focused on easily sharing information, which Wikipedia easily does! As one can see, Bush’s predictions of the future were very accurate, and we continue to strive towards Bush-like creations for managing large amounts of information.


http://boxesandarrows.com/foreseeing-the-future-the-legacy-of-vannevar-bush/

2 comments:

  1. Daniel, I like your analysis of the article that you took a look at. It clearly shows that the memex was all about organization and bringing information together to make it easier for users to access what they intend for. I like your analysis of Malone's comparison to Wikipedia. This is something we use everyday, and definitely a place where information is succinctly stored for users of online media to gain knowledge. Well done post.

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  2. The article I read as well mentioned using hyperlinks to go off on different tangents. I think it's interesting to see how an idea that came from the 1940's impacted the creation of the web as we see it today. Also I like how you brought up how we can improve on organizing information. I think it's important in today's age to see how although we have an abundance of information it is not necessarily easily accessible.

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