Reviews

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

marvinscherer's review

5.0

Very interesting essay on the visionary ideas of Vanebar Bush. He explains 3 devices that he has in mind in order to make sense of the always growing amount of output in terms of research and knowledge. He talks about the mini camera, which would be an idea somewhat similar to the google glasses. He also talks about the speech to text machine, which is pretty much what applications like otter.ai do. And finally he talks about the Memex, his own workspace for interconnecting ideas and keeping track of knowledge in a bottom-up approach. In some way, it would seem like Niklas Luhmann was directly inspired by Bush when he did his legendary Zettelkasten. This ideas set the seed for what the Hypertext, and the nowadays World Wide Web are. Being able to see what the internet has to offer, it is impressive to see, in how many ways it has being influenced by the ideas of Vanebar Bush, and also to see how it has terribly departed from it as well.