Reading 2: “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush
In 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush called on his fellow scientists to develop new tools to record and organize the wealth of their knowledge.
Bush wrote: ” The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
What do you think of Bush’s ideas? What technologies did he anticipate with accuracy and which would be useful inventions today? Have we developed adequate tools to access and evaluate new scientific developments? Or is our world closer to what Bush saw in 1945, too much information, poorly organized.
This article is available for student access in Blackboard/Documents/Week One. Please post your comments on this article by noon, Monday, April 7.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 pm
WWII, Cold War, Korea, Cold War, Vietnam, Cold War, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom — not a lot of free time for scientists to take up the “massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.” But Bush (writer) wrote this in an era when the whole nation went to war. 60 years later we may feel wars from a personal or economic perspective - but we no longer fight them cohesively.
It’s fun reading him write, at length, around the ideas of computers, credit cards, email and PDAs as nebulous machines and gadgetry needed to keep pace with progress.
If only this were an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability…
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Haha yes I like what you said there about if only this were an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability…Vannevar Bush was definitely ahead of his time, his essay articulates masterfully that information is power. Our senses and memories are inadequate to store all the knowledge we are exposed to or have the potential to access. The precision and accuracy of his predictions are extraordinary regarding how technology would advance to serve, above all, the need for access to information. His term “memex” is completely synonymous with “internet,” which he describes with startling detail. I wonder if there is a Vannevar Bush out there today who is making predictions of what the 22nd century holds, and if we are listening.
April 4th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Bush’s description of the desktop “memex”, slanting translucent screens, keyboard and vast memory, is remarkably similar to today’s laptop. His scheme of indexing is predictive of today’s internet search engines. He refers to frequently used words to reference indexed material that are similar to keywords embedded in internet text.
His discussion of moving from indexing of information to a technology that can recall data from “association,” is an accurate description of the concept behind effective search. Today’s internet search engines incorporate their own artificial intelligence to search the internet based on judgment of a user’s associative keyword intent from user history and click stream analysis.
His description of a record of the multitudes of encyclopedias and all forms of human information (both sight and sound) accurately describe today’s internet capabilities.
His prediction that this technological record of information would enable scientific progress niavely assumed that the body of knowledge would include information from scientific thought, research and humankind’s academic and societal achievements that would be of interest and bring improvements to society.
Today’s internet provides a record of human knowledge, but it is not commonly used with such lofty aspirations as Bush predicted. Humankind seems more interested in the latest YouTube parody, social networking, online shopping or other more voyeuristic pursuits than devoting time to utilizing the internet to advance society.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Our cheap, complex devices of… moderate… reliability have provided us a forum for so many lofty aspirations that it’s impossible to sort through them all. Think of MoveOn.org, microfinance, Wikipedia, to name a few. Of course there’s the crap, too. But that’s not new. Our generation did not invent crap.
I think there’s still too much information, but the organization has improved. I could locate a trustworthy explanation of quantum physics in about four seconds. In Bush’s age I would have had to track down a physical copy of a book or article, and to do that I’d need to have prior knowledge of the book’s title or what publication the article appeared in, and probably its title and date of publication. And a good librarian. And a library. Now I just need a web browser, a vague idea of what I’m looking for and a knowledge of which sources are reliable.
That’s something Bush did not anticipate: the difficulty of verifying a source’s reliability. Now with all the bloggers and pundits and sketchy journalists out there it’s harder to tell fact from fiction. I think he assumed information dissemination would still be a top-down affair.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
It’s funny to think that even in 1945, knowledge communities had to consider the issue of ‘too much information’…it would certainly seem as though the internet has taken things to an entirely new level. It’s something that strikes me every time I take too long doing research on a story before I start writing it. Every source leads to another, which leads to another, and still I feel I could do a better job with just a while longer for reading/researching.
In any case, the article served to reinforce the importance of quality over quantity as we set about blogging. As crucial as it will be to post frequently, it will be equally important to consider the real contribution each post makes.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Seeing as almost every aspect of modern technology was initially created (or was thought up) in the earlier half of the 20th century, and all we have done since then is improve on those inventions and ideas. Bush envisions improvements to all some of the basic technology pretty accurately. From being able to snap a picture and see it immediately to the “mechanized private file and library,” we call the internet.
I think his ideas on how information will be indexed, etc is close to what we have now, but I think we well always have too much information that it will be almost impossible to organize as he imagines. And not because the organization method is poor.
What’s amazing is that even as we get closer to achieving the future devices Bush writes about, none of the old technological ways are entirely obsolete. I still record my thoughts with pencil and paper, even though I have my laptop. I took a course on photography and developed film in a dark room and know others who still do. And I still find myself, at times, unable to find anything I want on the internet.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:01 am
In reading this article, two quotes stood out for me: the first was his mention that “while there is a growing amount of research, there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down.”
It surprises me that point was made in 1945, I would have thought that there would have been LESS information to deal with then. Now, there is sometimes so much information, that making sense of it all can be a challenge.
The second quote that stood out to me was when he mentioned that “publication has been extended far beyond the ability to make use of the record.” It brings up a point that people tend to write so many things that they tend to lose the goal of making each point meaningful.
Echoing the sentiments made by rknowles, this article reinforces the point that quality should always trump quantity. A lesson that should hold true in our blog postings.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Although Vannevar Bush wrote that “men cannot hope fully to duplicate [mental association] artificially,” it’s amazing how close online journalism has come to doing just that. When Bush walks the reader through the uses of a memex (the internet), and a catalog of arguments why the Turkish bow was better than the English long bow in the Crusades, he’s describing something similar to a blog or any form of internet writing.
On the internet, or in a blog, the connections made are associative, as well as through indexing. The liberal use of hyperlinks in a lot of online journalism effectively creates a “trail of many items,” allowing readers to learn more about certain concepts or words while still in the framework of the original article. By putting these links in the text, the writer allows readers to choose the trails they’ll follow. As Bush said: “Thus [the writer] builds a trail of interest through the maze of materials available to him.”
If he were still around today, Bush would definitely be blogging.
April 7th, 2008 at 12:26 am
“The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the computer. While Bush’s ideas may have been considered lofty or unrealistic at the time he had this article published, the devices we have come up with since this article are exactly what he was looking for. Digital cameras and camcorders operate hand-in-hand with computers via a “control card”.
We have printer/scanner/copier/fax machine/latte makers now that also work along with our computers. And despite its vastness, the Web is the most centralized location for all of the information Bush was talking about. Think about all of the resources we can get, just “armed with simple key board punches”.
The development of the personal computer alone has made the world we live in a smaller place, and I think if Bush was around today, he’d have an addiction to Youtube.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We have come a long way in 63 years, and I think this guy would probably mess himself if he saw Youtube.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:40 am
I like the point Rebecca makes in applying this to our own blogging– that we should be aware of quality over quantity. I feel that with the democratization of everything, with all of the websites out there, all of the blogs, all of the profiles, we’ve come to fill the space with so much noise just because…. we can. And so we have so much crap to wade through not because, as Erin points out, we invented crap, but because we have the means to carefully archive and document pretty much every whim we have– every interest, every relationship, every opinion we have. And it feels a bit like this culture of categorizing and labeling becomes a little bit internalized too, as people are encouraged through profile-making and online groups, etc, to outline the basic bullet points of their identity and make it searchable. Yikes!
April 7th, 2008 at 3:16 am
It’s interesting how Bush’s passage on photography mirrors the debate on the future of film. The growth of digital filmmaking has made film accessible to more people in ways than never before. Millions of people are able to use digital video cameras to tell their stories and share it with the world in person or online. But as old-school enthusiasts and others posting have argued, the quantity runs the risk overtaking quality.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Great point about the the Issue of Quantity of Information. It seems that in this essay, Bush kind of assumes that all information is good information and while he does an amazing job of telling us about the computer and Interwebs 50 years early, he conveniently leaves out the part about spam.
I think this essay also makes a point about how people have (hopefully) learned their lesson when it comes to guessing what the future might be like. From Bush’s descriptions of how these future devices might work, its made plain how even the smartest scientists are bound by extent of their experience. He got the concepts and goals of our current technological revolutions, but I’m still waiting for the walnut on my forehead that takes pictures. Apple is probably working on it.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Bush seems to have predicted databases, the personal computer, the Wikipedia, cybernetics, hyperlinks, digital photography, and magnetic storage media.
But it’s all analog. He wrote this just a couple of years too early. This piece just barely predates the digital age, pioneered by the fathers of computer science, Bush’s contemporaries, like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and lots of other smart cats who spent the war years whipping up nuclear weaponry and building devices to crack Nazi codes.
He scratches at the surface a stored-program computer when he describes machines that “will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted.” Perhaps he was in the know? So close.
But, he got something that the guys over at Yahoo! missed 50 years later, “the artificiality of systems of indexing.” There’s only so much value one gets from organizing. We need search! Add in hyperlinks, and you get Google, a search engine based on the concept that the usefulness of a pages is correlated to the quality and quantity of incoming links.
The world’s information seems poorly organized, but thats a myopic vision. It appears to be such a mess because of two factors. First, vastly more information is available to us online than ever before. Second, we’ve just begun sorting it out, and so we’re a bit behind the wave. But, the world’s information is far more organized and accessible than ever before, and every day new resources are made available to help us make sense of it.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:18 am
It’s not really fair to laugh at the past. History can’t offer a response to our smugness. Though it is incredible to think about where we’ve come since this was written. He focuses a lot of attention on collecting and storing data, tasks that google and terabyte sized hard drives have made practical for all. Technology now needs to come up with better ways for us to sort and access that data. I don’t know about you, but my hard drive is cluttered with junk and I have trouble reading a single news story all the way through without getting distracted by links. So my prediction: Figuring out how to make sense of all this information is where the future is at.