This week in the “Awakening the Digital Imagination” seminar we are reading an essay titled, As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. The essay was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan.
Throughout the article, Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems.
In this essay, Bush predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
Bush envisioned the ability to retrieve several articles or pictures on one screen, with the possibility of writing comments that could be stored and recalled together. He believed people would create links between related articles, thus mapping the thought process and path of each user and saving it for others to experience.
Bush concludes that through the application of science, which had recently been used to "throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons," scientists might help the human race "encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience."
It is hard to believe that someone would have the foresight to make such predictions, but Bush was clearly on the right path with his vision for the future.
His article is written for the masses and is easy to read and understand. It appears that he wrote for his audience, steering clear of jargon and scientific terms that would have been difficult for the average person to understand.
In sum, one might say that Bush's article helped create a blueprint for new media.
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