I have read Vannevar Bush’s How We May Think in the past and, like many, marveled at his surprisingly accurate view of the future, particularly the more recent evolution of the Web as a tool for collaborating and creating rather than just consuming. Reading it with the thoughtvectors “nuggets” assignment in mind led me down a few different trails. That is a warning to let you know that this will not be a “linear” blog post…I plan to jump from one idea to another, and some may lead to longer posts later. But for now, I’m getting it on the page and it will take longer to read than the average 15 seconds most people spend on a webpage. In a way, this blog entry is an example of how I think, the associations I make, the way my mind works:

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

The Tools of the Memex Machine

As I read the article, I found myself thinking about the tools themselves that I have watched emerge since I first got involved in the Internet in 1996. I am an avid Diigo user and was able to highlight and annotate the article in a way that matched Bush’s ideas about the memex machine. I could create my own version of the article easily and efficiently by grabbing sentences here and there and making quick comments as they occurred to me. Then, these snippets get reposted to this blog: scroll down on the right hand side and you’ll see what I’ve saved. I’ve also been toying with the auto-post feature on Diigo and doing weekly “of interest” posts is part of my commitment to this process of learning and sharing.

These tools allow us to feel reassured that we can find things later, the way Bush envisions:

His excursions 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.

One of the commenters on Bush’s article suggests that we are only part way towards this ability as our ideas are often scattered across a variety of “walled gardens” like Evernote and Pocket and more. And there are lots of tools…the key, I think, and an essential “digital” skill is to find your own way amongst them, choosing those that work for you and your flow.

War, Peace and Innovation

Writing just at the end of World War II, Bush was trying to figure out how science could continue to innovate in peace time. I had already been thinking about the intimate connection between war making and innovation as described by George Dyson in Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. In the preface, Dyson writes about the parallel development of nuclear weapons and computers with John von Neumann, a member of the Manhattan Project, as the center of both:

The race to build the hydrogen bomb was accelerated by von Neumann’s computer desire to build a computer, and the push to build von Neumann’s computer was accelerated by the race to build a hydroden bomb. Computers were essential to the initiation of nuclear explosions (p. x).

In his blog post, Dark Matter and Trailblazers – @mpedson and Vannevar Bush, Greg LLoyd includes the text of a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bush asking him to consider how, as the country moved from war to peace, science could begin solving problems of the living, from curing diseases to encouraging young people to go into science. Here’s the lingering question for me: would we have had the explosion of innovation in the 1950s if we hadn’t lived through the horrors of World War II?

Nibbling Bits

LLoyd also links to @mpedson’s article about technology and museums, where the main point seems to be that our great cultural institutions are simply not using the Internet effectively as a way to promote creativity and culture. Bush hints at this as well when he comments that we can compress all the knowledge of the world, but getting at it is the important part and sadly, not many people are doing that: “Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.” I shake my head sometimes that we have this amazing collaborative tool available to us and we use it to share selfies and take silly quizzes not to mention all those cat videos. One of the goals of my participation in the thoughtvectors course is to explore the possibilities of digging into the 90% of dark matter that we can’t see. And maybe redirect all that time I spend trolling Facebook to something a bit more constructive.

Replacing the Repetitive

Bush believes that the first thing machines can do most easily is replace repetitive work:

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

As I read this paragraph, I was reminded of one of my earliest jobs that helped get me through student teaching. I was a check proofer. Each evening, from 6 pm until about 10 pm, I showed up at the bank headquarters, settled in behind a machine and checked the work of the bank tellers. Checks and deposit slips moved past me and I entered the numbers using a calculator. Mismatches were flagged and it was my job to ferret out the mistakes. I got so good at this repetitive activity that I was awarded the “big” deposits, the ones with hundreds of checks where it was important that the proofer not make her own mistakes. I wondered if this repetitive activity in which I engaged nearly 30 years ago was still a job or if they had managed to replace the human element. It turns out, they have not.  It may have to do with, as Bush points out, the “clumsy” way we write figures. 

Girls At the Keyboards

While I wouldn’t necessarily classify myself as a feminist, I grew up in the heady days of womens’ liberation and believe I have benefited greatly from the battles fought by the generation before mine. I was four years old when NOW was created and considered Gloria Steinem a role model. I was lucky to be surrounded by family and friends who never told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. Unlike at least some women in the ed tech field, evidently, I have never felt marginalized because of my gender. But this sentence just leapt from the page and, despite all his futuristic ideas, put Bush squarely in his own era:

Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.

I suppose we should be happy that Bush found a place for the “girls” in the whole process. And I can’t help but wonder how the women involved in the Manhattan project fared as part of this male-dominated world. Because there were women and while many of them were typists or clerical assistants, many others were scientists. The Atomic Heritage Foundation features some of these women and Denise Keirnan tells some of the story in The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Behind the Bomb. 

In Conclusion

I’m done for now…these were the nuggets that impacted my thinking as I read Bush. I don’t have a grand wrap up, I’m afraid, some larger conclusion that will make everyone sit up and say “aha.” I’m happy for my own sake for having written this and hope at least one piece was useful to someone else.