As We May Think

I thought this Bush article was particularly neat - not really so much strictly in a sense of "ooh, neat, he just predicted hypertext and Wikipedia" either. Bush could make his predictions about the direction and scope of technology because he wasn't living with them, wasn't taking them for granted. From that vantage, maybe it's easier to really get down to a conceptual level of what's possible and what sort of innovation you can be driving toward. In other words, if I have a television in front of me, and have pretty much always had a television in front of me, I'll pretty much take the medium itself for granted and limit my inquiry to "well, what's on?" Any sort of thought on value, on "what does this allow me to do well?" takes a more concerted effort for me because we already have an established pattern of use for it. On the other hand, if I've never seen one before, I have a sort of built-in layer of abstraction.

That really gets into where I thought Bush's perspective on the differences between the strict operational limitations of a machine, when compared to the associative organization powers of the brain, were particularly insightful. We're wired to make qualitative comparisons: this thing here is much like this other thing there. Bush got that that's a fundamentally different mode of operation than that which is possible with a machine. A machine is vastly faster than a person, and can contain within it a (insert your favorite measure of really, really large) quantity of information. But for one thing, the computer doesn't "know" a thing. All its definitions are provided by programming. If you tell a computer something, no matter how preposterous -- if it floats in the sky and is wispy and white and made of water vapor, then that's a lampshade -- then to a computer that's true. And for another, the end user's still a human. So, what can we do with this piece of tech that makes it more accessible and valuable to a human user? Enable it to correlate pieces of information in ways that are similar to the way the processes already work in our brains.

That's the strength of hypertext, or just "linking" if you want to think about it more colloquially. In class I was thinking about how I used to do research, back before I had a computer. A research paper literally meant having an entire shoebox full of note cards, and needing to have some sort of indexing system so that I could find anything. The library's card catalog system was the same sort of deal. You could search it by title, and that was this one entire distinct set of records. Or, you could search by author, and that was a completely different set of records. You can't just use the title index and find The Road and then think "huh, I wonder what Cormac McCarthy has written recently" and then go from there. You have to re-approach it a different way, within the constraints of that system, and that meant starting over with a brand new inquiry.

What hypertext does well is gives us a means of making related information accessible from right where you are, without having to start over. And really, it's only possible because the medium itself is fundamentally different than immutable text. That's what makes this Bush article neat - it's written from this fresh perspective of "well, if this was possible, what could we do with it?" And what Bush came up with was Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." (Bush, 1945)

Of course Bush couldn't ever have imagined what happens when you give literally everyone access to the tools. Turns out we impose our organizational system on everything else, too. We put all our knowledge up on the web and shoot all sorts of associative tendrils through the lot to follow, but we do the same thing with blogs, and videos, and everything else we make, too.

It's somewhat akin to the (Rousseau?) saying, "God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." We have this technological feat, and in order to make it accessible and intuitive and natural to use, we want to make it work like we do. Extending that line of thinking, it's like we were discussing in class with regards to how we confer weight or significance in academic literature. Our hierarchy in linking, assigning weight to what links to what else, is straight out of existing schema - "how can we make this legacy system extensible into this new tool?"