By Gian Morris-Perez
The musings about the future of research and technology by one Vannevar Bush, I found to be strikingly old-fashioned, slightly sexist, yet an inspiring creative take on the future of human technology. Bush never suggests anything too outlandish, in fact he even goes as far to supplement his own “future castings” with the latest in scientific advancements of his time. As I was reading, I tried to relate his predictions to current (what we might consider to be common) technology, such as a mechanical calculator (a machine which quickly solves arithmetic computations for us), a gopro/head mounted camera, speech to text, and keyword search functions for both personal documents and online library/database (rather than research and file organization through alphabetic indexing which Bush described as cumbersome). A notable difference between Bush’s vision of human’s shared hub of information, and the current world wide web, is that Bush’s version is full of rich information not hiding amidst distracting pop-ups, entertainment, and misinformation - the utopia of what the web was promised to be. Finally, my favorite, Bush uses his knowledge of the way human memory works in order to creatively reimagine the filing process of the future. A way which follows the path (which he calls a “trail”) a researcher would take to review relevant sources of information - a similar but way more expanded version of today's digital directory system.
Reflection 2: Log Live the Web
By Gian Morris-Perez
As I mentioned in my previous reflection, Bush’s optimistic version of the Web most closely resembles what the Web was promised to be. Tim Berners-Lee discusses the current ailments of today’s Web by centering the discussion on the erosion of its basic principles. These principles being: universality (aka accessibility from any connected device), decentralized and free to publish, share, and collect information on the Web.
On the one hand, I find this idea of a utopian Web appealing, however, possibly over optimistic. I wonder if these principles are sufficient in and of themselves to allow for that utopia to emerge organically. If most of these fundamental principles are already built into the architecture of the World Wide Web, why is today’s Web no closer to the Web Berners-Lee envisioned a decade ago? The two most notable problems I notice while using the current Web are: 1) the overabundance of information - unlike a public library in which the selection is curated by a librarian and is thus inherently filtered - the democratic structure of the Web has led to an oversaturation of extraneous information, making it even harder to sort through the available documents. 2) Although a perfect Web would be one in which data are shared and merged to address larger, more complex problems (e.g., Berners-Lee illustrates the importance of data sharing for curing Alzheimer's disease), researchers are for some reason not willing to share their data to the extent that he describes. Perhaps this is due to mistrust among researchers or their own self-interest in being the first to “find the cure” but it is not happening on the scale that might take full advantage of the Web's potential.