Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson were visionary thinkers seeking solutions to the problems of information overload and hierarchical storage systems that seemed to stifle human creativity and associative thought. Now that we have the World Wide Web, in what ways have these visions of Bush and Nelson been realized? What remains unrealized?
Bush and Nelson provided an exceptional forecast for devices that they had zero exposure to at the time of their respective discussions. While they provided key concepts as to what could potentially be expected from certain archetypes and maybe inadvertently brought about the way these tools functioned out of their own fruition, they also hit the nail on the head with the potential adversities we would be facing as technology slowly became more integrated into our daily lives.
Nelson used a great “automobile analogy” to describe a simple, mundane circumstance (which many of us have been forced into), and how incomprehensible that circumstance or string of words may have been to someone living in 1905. He used this as a tie-back to how complicated computers and understanding information systems may seem at first – but that understanding and integrating these systems into our lives is a question of when, not if.
“The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory.”
Similarly, Bush made, not so much an analogy, but a prediction towards memory supplementation which he coined as “memex”, that was intended to be a device that would be capable of storing records of all formats. He essentially described what would come to be the modern home PC’s and smart devices we carry around today.
Bush and Nelson effectively described that one of the underlying issues with information systems is that wide-spread publication of these systems would leave more questions unanswered than not. They both agreed that the process would lead to exacerbation and the gradual overloading of information for the average consumer. Both agreed and attested that the more information that was provided, the more that information needed to be explained. One of few things that I don’t recall Bush or Nelson speaking to is how susceptible to distraction these devices would make people. I don’t think either anticipated that the network of the world would run on cat videos and 7 second bits of “snackable” content.