My Memex

On reading Bush's essay I was struck by how his predictions ranged from eerily accurate, to ridiculously off the mark. There are elements of today's reality within all of his predictions, but there are also elements that seem comically antiquated, revealing the mental hurdles that many decades ago were still quite difficult to leap. In general, Bush seemed to have an uncanny understanding of problems associated with the rapid expansion of technology that he saw during WW2, and he could also clearly see the principles that would need to be adopted in order to address those problems.

We have the luxury today of living in a digital world, even if most of us are ignorant of how it really works. The metaphysical existence of content, stored as binary information, is a difficult concept to grasp by any standard, and it is easy to talk about the contents of our computers as if they do physically exist somewhere, like a book or a reel of film. The ever-expanding reams of content that Bush predicted is certainly true today; there are more options for collecting and generating information then he would have ever imagined. Ironically, though, his idea that data would be stored on masses of microfilm has come and gone, and to us even today seems antiquated. I think the primary obstacle to Bush's thinking was an inability to foresee how digital information could play a part in the communication of the future. He certainly hints at the use of logic machines and magnetic data storage, but he was, I think, conceptually stuck, believing that perceptual information like imagery and sound would still be stored in analog perceptual media (like the tiny images he mentions often), and that the primary use of digital data would be for seemingly abstract computation to supplement that content.

Nonetheless, Bush's essay is fascinating in its conceptual accuracy, even if his descriptions of the future are a bit off. I think we are reading it because it is a lesson to all of us not to get hung up on the technologies of the day. On several occasions, Bush essentially says "we can't do this today, but I'm sure we'll figure it out soon." Its this optimism and willingness to look past our culture's technical inadequacies and focus on broad principles that will enable us to innovate in the most interesting and useful ways.