"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush

Knowing before I began reading it that Bush's As We May Think was a bit prophetic, I considered how I thought Ender's Game to be prophetic, what with the boards Valentine and Peter post on. Bush's piece is far more forward-thinking and right-on than Card's novel, though.

Writing in 1945, he argues we have a great deal of recorded human knowledge and experience without an efficient method of selection and retrieval. In a sense, we have too much knowledge and experience on record because we can't even use it if we aren't able to quickly sift through it to get what we need to suit our purposes. He envisions a method of record-keeping that allows the user/researcher to sort through records in an associative, natural manner, rather than the archaic method of his time -- pre-determined, indexed paths to obtaining information. He envisions a way to create "trails" of discovery from one piece of information to the next, akin to a stream of consciousness -- one datum leading to a related piece of datum leading to yet another, however digressive it may be.

This idea is very much like the WWW as we know it today. A rudimentary search about Mercury in retrograde can land a user at the homepage for the local Quaker Circle of Friends an hour later. How did he get from astrology to Quakers? Keep clicking the "back" button on his browser or check out his web history.

I think, though, that we are still experiencing a similar overwhelmedness (is that a word?) to the one Bush seems to express. There is so much information and so many ways to veer off the narrow path one intended to stay on that it is easy to lose focus when performing research on the Internet. I find myself seeing links on a page and thinking "Oh, I'll come back and check that out after i click this link" and then I never do end up returning. It is as though we have gotten too good at linking the different "trails" of information associations and I find myself getting overwhelmed and distracted, sometimes frustrated and put-off altogether.

Another concept Bush brings up that I liked is the idea of mechanizing repetitive thoughts/actions to free up the brain for more creative purposes. Likewise, he argues that if we have a better archiving system that allows for ease of access and navigation, Man can stop trying to remember everything. The archival technology will remember it for him, freeing up brain space for other endeavors.