During World War II, many applications of human factors and cognitive science research techniques were being utilized to understand obstacles with soldiers and their use of technology. In fact, many scientists and scholars emerged during wars and in response, they developed practical tools and innovations in order to benefit the efficiency of work on many levels. Vannevar Bush was one of the greatest pioneers of his time. In his “As We May Think” Bush insinuated his concern, as well as his wishful pursuing, on the scientist who can rekindle “a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.” His creation of Memex thoroughly manifested his prescient vision for the information age and his ideology of expending our knowledge in a faster and productive way.
Memex is a hypothetical proto-hypertext system, and it is meant to make science more accessible. Bush leveraged the arithmetical machinery and the economic production to enhance our technological progress at a rapid rate – Memex compressed and stored the overloaded information (knowledge) in a more reachable way. The machine generated information, like our brain, for us to obtain easily.
Fast forward to today, top technology companies like Google followed Bush’s legacy and finesse the world that is full of information and metadata. I think the principle of Memex has an enormous impact on the future of work, like Google research, I can see it could be the “final version” of Memex – we go on its single search bar and type WHATEVER we want to know, it not only gives you all the information you need in one second, but it also predicts the results for you with many possibilities before you finishing typing. This level of responsive of information is the truly a game changer.
Additionally, due to the conspiracy recently happened between two different countries who were fighting the ownership over a billion app – Tiktok, is indeed a powerful platform that contains an overwhelming amount of data that we could never imagine. There are many apps like Tiktok where people can share their interests and create unlimited content anytime and anywhere they want. Although the purpose of these apps is not totally aligned with Vannevar Bush’s original intention, the evolution of his ideology catalyzed the ongoing development of technology, and today it helps the transformation of how we communicate and entertain each other.
it is inspired to see how you compare the similarities between the memex and one of the most popular social/entertainment app Tiktok that has enormous amount of data.
I like you take on the conversation with the conspiracy of TikTok and go deep about the meaningfulness of data.
I agree with that TikTok nowadays has a large amount of users that we couldn’t imagine, people using it as a public media tools to learn new things, or to watch news, or post their likes.memex does has an enormous impact on all those future works apps.