Forget the Abacus, I want a Memex!

So the first thing I did was get on my “Memex” and Google “origin and properties of the bow and arrow,” how many results do you think I got? Yep, 78,900 results in less than a second!

All four authors were interested in how technology will affect information - storage, organization or dissemination. Although, Bush and Englebert, both subscribed to the central idea that we can augment human memory and intellect with what has come to be known as the computer, they also differ and are limited in their foresight based on the time of writing and what information was available to extrapolate from. McluLan and Williams both wrote more specifically on dissemination of information in a new mass media age.

Bush writing in 1945 as the second world war was winding down is most fascinating, visionary and inspiring. He was quick to realize that when the war is over, physicists would be needed to use their skills in something else (well someone should have told him about a little episode in history called the Cold War). Bush foresaw what would be cameras, automated and vastly improved automobiles, but his greatest prediction was the Computer - a machine that would be needed to store, organize and expand the vast amount of information that humans were creating on a daily basis.

Engelbert writing in 1962 and having been privy to research information on one of the earliest computers, was the first to be able to test Bush’s predictions and hypotheses. With the improved information (at the time) available to Engelbert, his paper is not so much a futuristic one as Bush’s but one that would use new information to “find factors that limit individual’s basic information handling capacities” and how to “develop new techniques, procedures and systems” to solve these problems. Yet, the central goal remained what to do with the information that we are accumulating at a rapid pace? In summary, while Bush could only fascinate about a Memex, almost twenty years later, Engelbert’s work asked the questions, What would computers be able to do? How much will they be able to do and what will limit them?

McLuhan, although also concerned with information, was more focused on the media. He looked at the transfer of information, not so much on storage and organization. He noted that the “medium is the message,” and thus “content of any medium is always another medium.” McLuhan looked historically at how the available technology (medium) have affected information (mass media) - Print, Radio, then Television. If his essay had been a futuristic one like those of Bush and Engelbert, McLuhan would have explored how the new technology of storing and disseminating information (electric media) would affect the media in the form of computers and the Internet. Along the lines of McLuhan, Williams writing in 1972, took the cultural view of technology and its effect on society but with a narrower focus on mostly the television. Williams posited that “if the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects.”