As we may think

New Media Art / Ji Sun Lee (Sun) 02/21/2005

As we may think

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. … His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
Vannevar Bush “As we may think”

Vannerva Bush, who was the first scientist in computer science field and truly considered the potential of the computer, had found potential possiblities about “Life Caching” of the computer before the invention of the Eniac which was the first personal computer. In addition, he researched the fact that the human mind has moved from an association of the idea to other associations, and he designed the “Memex” based on the idea.

How information would be gathered, stored, and accessed in an increasingly information-saturated world
Vannevar Bush “As we may think”

The “Memex” is the memory extender and a new way for saving and sharing information and knowledge. The “Memex” is mimic version of the human mind or brain. Based on the association in the human brain, it constructs information through the each personal association and it forms a huge scale of encyclopedia including text, images, and sound. The “Memex” is the machine which makes it possible to extend human memory and association. In this article, he depicted this “Memex” using invented technologies at that time like photography or film and these technologies was described by the similar concept of the process in the human mind or brain.

He mentioned about the way of storing, creation or generation, and examination of the record. Moreover, recording of millions of books in library could be possible to reduce to the size of a desk using micro film. He predicted that people could see and use the micro film using a projector. This is a very similar concept to save records in the database these days.

The quantity of the records is getting bigger and bigger and so the retrieval of the record should be changed using sorting by numerical and alphabetical indexing. However, if the user wants to find the information, he or she has to know the indexing rule. Even if the user finds one piece of information, for searching other information, he or she should start again from the first.

However, the human mind doesn’t work that way. The human brain transmits thinking or memory of the human from the one item to the other associated item. This memory or information of each item is stretched like cobwebs in the brain. Although the machine could not copy the process of the human brain, the machine could apply the structure or the system which records a selection by association, and permanence and clarity of the record.

Vannerva Bush presented the basic concept of the personal computer and Hypertext. Afterward, this concept has an influence on the formation of the World Wide Web. Moreover, he showed the meaning and the vision; how people adapt the computer technology in daily life after World War 2. This was connected with Cybernetics later. Vannerva Bush was a profound thinker of the computer technology.

Nowadays, the Microsoft Research Center are studying the vision of the “Memex” through the project “My life bits”. In this project “My life bits”, the researchers are trying to store various kinds of information and knowledge using lots of devices. They recorded text, images, sound, and video data. Recently they are also recording television channels and telephone calls.

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
Mylifebits from http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

In the future, people will receive and use more information than nowadays. People will need the devices or technologies which alternate with their limited brain ability. Every moment and event will be saved in some place or machine, and people will learn how to recall specific data about that later. The scientist will try to invent a similar concept of the “Memex”, and finally new kinds of “Memex” will be developed for storing and recalling data. The new “Memex” would be more complex than the current computer and include more various formats of data. Ability to remember would not be important. On the other hand, the ability for finding accurate information and combining knowledge would be more popular than ever before.