As We May Be Wrong

Upon reading “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush I was very impressed and at times quite bored with the level of detail that he went into describing the problems and potential future solutions to the issues of his day. Most of what he described in his article was related to recording, organizing, processing, sorting and transferring information. The most fascinating part to me was that no mater how thoughtful, and detailed his ideas were, they were all completely useless.

All of Bush’s plans and musings were based on analogue technologies. Using film, punch cards and other such methods have now, in what has become the future, been completely eclipsed by the computer and digital storage of data. Bush was hoping that as scientist work progressed they would make higher resolution microfilm with 100 times the data density of current film, “dry” photography with out the need for liquid chemicals and a new symbolism to allow machines to be able to calculate everyday decisions for us. In the end we didn’t need any of these devices. Bush was barking up the wrong tree.

It is interesting to contrast Bush’s article with the video on Otlet’s vision. Otlet’s ideas were much closer to the system in which we currently organize and communicate information today. While Bush imagined we would all possess highly mechanized desk what would store thousands of sheets of high resolution microfilm Otlet imagined we would possess devices that would be able to access and view information that would be stored remotely and only be called up as we requested it. He even imagined video and audio being integrated into the viewer.

Since 1945 a lot has changed. It is easy to think that since Bush ended up so wrong there is no point in speculate about the direction that technology will take us in the future. Just like Bush got a lot of thing wrong, he and Otlet got a lot of things right. One of the most important things that I noticed in Bush’s article are his thoughts on how humans organize data. He even suggest that is memex records data using what he called trails. He recognized that the brain work by association, not in hierarchies. His most valuable incite came from when he focused on the way human’s use machines and not on the technology itself. That is something that is very important for us to remember as digital designers.