Vannevar Bush - As We May Think

I hadn’t heard of Vannevar Bush before taking the introductory Atlas course here at CU. I quickly learned that he was the big cheese in R&D for the military as well as the founder of Ratheon. His memex microfilm viewer quite possibly could be considered the genesis for the World Wide Web. I think he would be astounded at the way the internet has responded to his call for sharing of information. Even by the time of his death in 1974 they couldn’t have guessed that it would become so much a part of how we live that few can remember going without it. In the same manner that Bush asked “of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence” maybe we should be asking what we should be doing with the internet. He would probably roll over in his grave if he knew how deeply social media has burrowed into the fabric of our society. The serious question today is the issue of how connected but disconnected we are. Applications are coming and going at such a rapid pace today that they are obsolete in a matter of months. Instant messaging has almost replaced email (let alone a phone conversation) as our primary mode of communication and family albums can be stored in our phones. Bush talks about the economics of the situation and well, I think we have crossed that threshold where we can afford to develop any certain technology we want to. I still can’t understand why we are dragging our feet on clean energy solutions - but that is a political thing I believe. “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Yes it has Vannevar but do we really need all these “cheap” devices. What a great essay though, kind of Treky even, the way Bush describes the future. I just love the way, he is describing modern day digital photography; “often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.” And so funny to hear him describe our modern supermarket transaction all the way down to minute details like the magnetic strip on the back of our debit or credit card with a point-of-sale merchant. What a delight to hear him ramble on about our futuristic “work station”, where I am at this moment speaking, yes voice recognition software, into my personal computer and creating one of his “threads” while I am at it. The personal computer even has its own acronym which a military man such as he could appreciate. He talks about systems of indexing which uncannily suggest web pages. The collective knowledge he speaks about can be accessed in a matter of nano-seconds and the threads he mentions are being mathematically hypothesized by search engine algorithms that know what you are looking for two letters into your search. In his paper he basically defines every little detail about our digital culture today. Another very important question here concerns the ethics of online interactivity. With all this sharing of all this collective knowledge it begs the question who has gained the upper hand. We are starting to sound like the Borg from Star Trek. What is this doing to our individuality? With the advent of Life 2.0, people are living fuller lives online than off. Mr. Bush couldn’t have possibly known the side effects of all this technology when he wrote of “his excursion being more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important (Pg. 19).” We have already seen this in the web's ability to both facilitate and destroy human relationships. Where do we go from here?