Tag Archives: Binary Code

Chris Stansberry Discussion Post 2

@stansberry_dtcv

Sorry class.. Didn’t realize I hadn’t ‘published’ my post yet..

In his letter to Fortune magazine that was transformed into the essay “As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush explains and predicts many advanced and future technologies in the time of writing the essay. He successfully describes a prediction in the advancement of the computer, photography, speech recognition, the internet, and even the world wide web in link to his invention of the “memex”. Bush even predicts the digitalization of encyclopedia’s when he says: “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”. In this sense, even back then the world was becoming surrounded by technology, technology comprised of numbers and mathematical formulas. In the “Dream Scene” of the Matrix, binary code (1’s and 0’s) is shown raining and making up everything in the frame. This represents everything from our laptops, smartphones, cameras, and even simpler things such as thermostats can all be numerically represented and boiled down to binary code. The simple truth is these technologies are all around us, all the time, especially in modern time and this is what’s portrayed in the Matrix scene. So many of the things we take for granted today or don’t even realize are a direct cause of the advancements in technology that made these items possible that Bush talks about.