760: on bush's as we may think

I've always wondered what Vannevar Bush would think of the Internet and all its ancillary technologies as they exist today. He lived long enough to see the deployment of ARPANET, but I've never come across any commentary on his reflections of it.

After reading the Wells essay, Bush appears to address the short-comings of Wells' reactive system: "... every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine .... The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and rather advanced logic" (4, 5).

Beyond the futurist examples of applied information technologies Bush provides in the essay, the section I've seen most cited is his description of the "memex" (6). I've seen the description referred to as an early imagining of the personal computer, relational databases, and the Internet. What I like most about the memex is the way in which Bush addresses the problem of "selection" and "the artificiality of systems of indexing" (6). This is where he moves beyond the elementary descriptions of vast accessible repositories of data and the textual and numerical taxonomies constructed by early information scientists.

With the memex, Bush is proposing something akin to a neural network. "When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions" (7). Bush's "trails" are the hyperlinks of today and the associative relationships being imagined for the semantic web. "Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage" (6).

Bush's intelligent system argument seems to take something of an anti-positivist perspective (or at least less positivistic than Wells): "If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world ... A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs" (4, 5). And yet, how much of this argument, like Wells', is in reaction to global war and unprecedented man-made destruction. There is this theme of "information as all-empowering" -- that an intelligent information system will keep the mistakes of the past accessible and present in such a way as to not be repeated by future generations. "The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house... They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good" (8).

In regard to its relationship to technical communication, I've always liked this essay because of when it was written. Casual historians of technical communication like to point to World War II as the birth of the discipline of technical communication (technical writing). These historians argue that, similar to the business and societal demands of the Industrial Revolution, World War II placed unfair demands on schools to graduate technical writers who could write military procedures, technical descriptions, and weapons instructions for readers with below-average language skills. However anecdotally appropriate these casual conclusions may be, the true effects of World War II on technical writing had more to do with socio-economic factors than with demand for effective technical communicators. Like all of society, post-war American colleges found the world a different place. From 1940 to 1945, the top research schools (and a good number of teaching schools) had become part of an interdependent economic complex, one that tied together government, industry, and higher education. This relationship was most apparent at the engineering schools, were it was recognized and capitalized on by many teachers of technical and science writing courses.