The distinguished scientist and scholar Vannevar Bush first outlined his vision of Memex in his 1945 article “As We May Think” while serving as the scientific adviser to President Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In his article, Bush discussed a possible direction for human technology in the aftermath of World War II, envisioning an automated information management system, a machine that stores and retrieves memories through a vast amount of microfilms, emulating the way that our brain links data by association rather than indexes, which is very similar to the concept of the web and computers that we are using today.
Living in the digital age, we are not strange to the concept of memories being conveniently and Living in the digital age, we are not strange to the concept of memories being conveniently and seamlessly documented, either in the form of a tangible object such as a hard drive or something obscure such as cloud storage. We live in an era where someone could download an entire movie on their phone, keep a 20-page scholarly paper in a USB drive smaller than a bar of chocolate, or store 5,000 photos on the Google Photos app; storing and retrieving memories is getting cheaper and more convenient by the day. Nowadays, the focal point of the web’s function remains relatively the same: to publish and share, to provide easy access; however, it has exceeded beyond that and become the primary tool for us to communicate. Take the early days of blogging and the Instagram of today for example, the central concept of publishing and posting remains the same. Still, since people nowadays seem to have more fragmented time, publication and sharing have evolved from long blogs to shorter content, such as pictures, to catch someone’s attention as much as possible.
