Bush Article

Vannevar Bush may have been talking about a different kind of information overload than we mean today when we use the term but the idea that all that information useful or not doesn’t do much good if we don’t have access to it. He goes even further with his thesis to say that ease of access to info shouldn’t be the only goal and technology should aid people in making real use of knowledge. In this article Bush never takes the human element for granted and in fact sees it as an integral part of the success of new technology.

I think the most exciting part of Bush’s article is his ideas on “associative indexing.” It really shows the importance of people in the information system. With all his faith in technology he is willing to admit that it would be nearly impossible to replace the intuition and abstract though of a person. Bush never suggests that a machine could take over the building of associative trails only that they can make it possible for people to do so.

I found two places where Bush brings up libraries. One is where he mentions that rapid information selection “might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story.” The second is where he recognizes that “the modern great library is not generally consulted, it is nibbled at by a few.” These to quotes seem to indicate that Bush saw libraries as unnecessary in the world of the memex. At the very least one could say that Bush was talking about only scholarly texts but when we think about the associative trails of the internet they concern everything and anything. In a lot of cases it is faster and easier to consult Wikipedia than a book in a library.