From memex to Tiktok

Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly “As We May Think” in 1945. As early as the 1930s he was already ahead of his time in wanting to improve the way people accessed, stored, and communicated information.

In this landmark article, he describes a hypothetical computer-like machine, the memex, which would help someone find information based on association and context rather than strict categorical indexing. “A memex is a device in which individual stores his books, records, and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” We are so familiar with creating contents on the internet that it’s hard to imagine without all the authoring tools. From simple action like “like” an Instagram image to post a blog online, the internet user becomes author as well, just like Bush’s expectation we don’t have to be scientists to be able to manipulate data. We are still on our own way to develop more interactive software that allows a reader’s associative ability to be more automated and made available to others across. One of the most recent examples of how the interactive algorithm is catered to personal usage is the Tiktok algorithm. When users search, browse, or like a specific content, TikTok will suggest more videos and creators of the same category. It still a mystery how exactly they categorize those contents but we can definitely say the user’s authorship is a huge database that the computer algorithm had collected and catered only to them.

Vannevar Bush described how the computer combines, sortes all information in one place under rules and traceable paths in 1945, and in 2020, all of that descriptions are true.