User:Inge Hoonte/aswemaythink

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think
Makes me think of Steampunk which is a reversed form of As We May Think. It looks back and appropriates items, style, clothing, furniture with a sense of nostalgia. Instead of imagined and developed in 1870, it is a nostalgic look back on aesthetics from now to then.

Notes on the text:

Situated right after WWII > Argues that all scholars can find their place in society again, except physicists. They left academics to make bombs, guns, etc.
Knowledge gets lost in the mass of the inconsequential (also, finding out something has existed for years, a movement, platform, whatever, without you knowing it... it's all out there and you can read about it and often you just don't)
'The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.'
Human operator
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
A record (of information, ed) should be able to be extended, stored and consulted.
Nibbling at a library.
Push pencil, tap typewriter. Digest. Correct. Set, print, distribute.
Interesting how he says something is still "in embryo". It refers to present state, it exists and it implies it still has tons of developing to do, possibilities to grow.
"the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things"
If manipulation of data is repetitive, it should be fed to a machine. Much more economical.
Artificiality of systems of indexing. Info found by tracing it from subclass to subclass. Human mind operates by association (pandora! google! ads!). Memory is transitory.
THE REAL HEART OF THE MATTER OF SELECTION
Microfilm stored in a machine = the visual memory as understood by man. Scrolling through pages and being able to add one's own comments (=wiki)