“A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.”This is a summary of the development of records mentioned by Vannevar Bush in “As We May Think”. It can also be regarded as the development goal of writing, photography, printing and other fields.
In this article, Vannevar Bush puts forward the idea of Memex, which I think was a very advanced concept. Memex is the combination of the first two words of “memory extender”, which means “the extension of memory”. In other words, the media/machine can retrieve any information in the library at any time. However, this science fiction concept has really become a reality. Later, many early computer papers mentioned this machine. The invention of hypertext is also inspired by the description of information switching in this paper. The success of sites like Google can be traced back to this concept as well.
Memex, in modern times, may sometimes know more about our brains than we do. It’s not hard to find that the most popular social softwares now has technologies to trace people’s preferences, such as Tik Tok, Instagram and so on. For example, if you laugh for a long time because of a random meme, you will click like, favorite, and even forward it. The system will define your preferences according to your behavior, thus pushing more similar things, meeting your emotional needs and deepening your recognition.
Therefore, I would say that the modern version of Memex is an extension of the user’s brain.
“the modern version of Memex is an extension of the user’s brain.” Really interesting idea! I love it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Modern Memex, really interesting !
I agree with the machine learning that is dominating our social media today, I find it surprisingly interesting by how much work the designer has done at the back, this is all psychology!