Reading Response #2 (Media 280)

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

The idea of memex is very interesting. At the same time, it is very amazing that Bush came up with this idea of memex in the 1940s when was before this new technology era. Since technology has been developed a lot, pretty much everything is possible to do and to come up with practical idea like this; however Bush came up with the idea and calculated everything how it would work before this technology era. I think that it is very amazing.

If you look at the drawing of inside of memex from Bush’s article, you see so many similarities from computers today: it has a keyboard and you can find a data stored in the computer by using it, and I thought that today’s computer is designed based on memex. Moreover, it gave us a basic idea of hypertext as we have discussed in class, which is the idea of jumping from one item to another. To have a sense of how hypertext works, we went to Wikipedia and tried where we would reach to with clicking 10 references. We started from J.P Morgan and ended up with the totally different term. Throughout this, I thought that the idea of hypertext is similar to traveling: you may just go straightforward to your destination, or you may stop by some places on a way to the destination. You may not be able reach to your destination without stopping by few places. It is very interesting to think about.

This traveling-like idea helped the development of hypertext and it has been helpful in our lives. I liked the statement what Bush makes in his article: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately in hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (47). Because we have hypertext now, it is possible to find the same item again easily: the idea of memex created the re-accessibility is and the easiness to do it. In addition to it, it also created “immediateness” to stored item. I think that this immediateness is the most different thing from human’s mind. Bush says that the human’s mind does not work in the way that memex does. I think that the human’s brain has an ability to leap one memory to another, however it cannot do that as smooth and immediate as hypertext does, because the human’s brain does not work mechanically. We forget memory sometimes and just remember it all of the sudden: there is no absoluteness that the human’s brain draws out stored memory anytime we need.

The statement made me thought that we rely on technology to redeem unsatisfactory features in the cerebral mechanism. There is a limit to restore everything we have found or learned in human’s brain. The capacity is depending on how intelligent the person is, but no one can remember everything that they have learned. Today, we redesigned the idea with the developed electronic technology, and we rely on it. Memex as a machine is outdated; however the concept of it is still alive and is helping us as an external part of our brains.