We Are Deciding Our Future

Vannevar Bush’s idea “The Memex” used to be a new, complicated, and unreliable way of memorization for people in the 1930’s, but time turned it into a memory system on which modern people rely on. We changed complexity and reliability from synonyms to antonyms.

Google has become the most popular search engine because they have used big data to vision that they need a systematic way of processing their user’s search results, which is to let the summarization of the historical browsing record filter the searching output. This seems to have nothing to do with ordinary people, but it makes our daily life convenient in an invisible way. This refers to the light tubes and camera topic mentioned in “As We May Think-The Atlantic”: People’s living demands at that time made the use of light tubes and cameras too expensive and unnecessary to have because the light ball can be replaced with the cost less kerosene that has the same illuminating effect. Same with Photography, at that time, people only considered it as a way of high-cost entertainment, not a way of documenting lives. It was mainly cheaper and easier to write it down by hand.

Nevertheless, now it is different. With the development of the times, our way of thinking has begun to change. It is common to use photos as a method of documenting lives because we valued time, and photo-taking is just a snap compared to writing. This led to a large number of productions like cameras and phones. These tend to be high-cost complex products, but now we made everyone afford it. Because as the needs increase, the manufacturing cost will decrease.

Moreover, who decided to make this life shearing method popular? It is ourselves. When we have the concepts of the public sharing method like memex and hyperlink, it shortens the time we write with a pen to a flash moment of typing and taking pictures; it also turns the old sharing habit into a searching by Keywords method, which is more efficient for everyone’s searching and sharing experience. This kind of big data has proven to the manufacturer our public preference; therefore it is why they keep innovating and developing more convenient cameras, mobile phones, and life recording products to meet people’s needs.

The best examples are the most popular applications: Instagram and TikTok. They were created to let everyone document their lives in an organized way with tags, keywords, and the essential thing: unlimited personal storage. Therefore, every significant event that the user wants to recall can be viewed more quickly and efficiently.

This whole way of recording history not only facilitates our daily lives but also preserves the history of each country more completely so that makes our vision complete. Therefore, each of us is an invisible designer, and everyone is influencing our future life direction little by little.