Andy’s New Media Blog

Although it’s always interesting to read accounts of what out predecessors thought the future would be like, many of these accounts are more humorous than they are informing.  Fortunately that isn’t the case with Bush who seems to have invented the groundwork for the internet without being able to conceive of the technology that would eventually make it possible.  Obviously he had no way of knowing that high speed computing machines would be invented long before someone got the idea of transferring information between them via phone lines.  Despite this limitation, Bush was still able to see that the means by which we acquire information and the amount of information available would necessarily increase with the increases in computing technology.  Personally one of his ideas that I found most interesting was the idea that traditional methods of archiving information would soon become obsolete in favor of following trails of informational sources that may only be tangentially related.  Bush thought this information would be contained on microfilm, but that is almost the only difference between his prediction and reality.  One of the coolest aspects of sites like Wikipedia is the ability to start studying one subject, then continuously jump around to related topics until you find yourself somewhere that superficially seems unconnected to the starting point.  Bush seems to mostly concentrate on the academic possibilities of the Memex machine, but it’s worth pointing out that this interconnectedness specific bits of information has been expanded to be useful a bunch of other things.  Some examples are Netflix which continuously links users to new movies based on their previous choices, and Youtube which attempts to find related videos to whatever one chooses to watch.