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?
Since the creation of the world wide web, Vannevar Bush’s and Ted Nelson’s visions have missed the mark while other visions have been realized. Because the web is so complex now, it would have been entirely impossible for them to predict what the internet would turn into, yet still Bush and Nelson’s ideas have wielded influence on the internet’s outcome.
Vannevar Bush who created the hypothetical memex machine follows the idea of associative trails. The notion of associative trails mirror the way our brain works, and Bush’s memex machine aimed to capture this. By storing thoughts, annotations, and ideas it would allow the user to quickly reference past ideas by looking up a topic. There are similarities to this in the modern day internet where people can search version histories and review notes on interconnected cloud software such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs but no such physical version exists. It would be interesting to see how Vannevar Bush would have approached the internet today and if he would prefer a dedicated machine to do this or if he would happy with software.
A large focus of Ted Nelson’s life was dedicated to “Project Xanadu”, a digital database that allowed users to publish documents electronically across the world. A key component of this project centered around the way documents could be traced. As people edited or updated documents, other users could compare version history side by side. This let the origins of quotes be easily accessible along with who said or edited them and when. Nelson wanted Project Xanadu to be a “..valid copyright system, a literary legal and business arrangement for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount”. As Nelson has regrettably witnessed, the internet did not end up this way, and as such his vision for Project Xanadu has never seen widespread adaptation.