The Memex, the Record, and Interactive Writing

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush describes ideas that make the Internet so extremely powerful today: the memex and the record. In Polymers, Paranoia, and the Rhetorics Hypertext, Moulthrop looks into how creative writing spaces are different from Gutenberg’s printing press, which is also explained in From Gutenberg to Gates to Google.

In 1945, Bush wrote As We May Think in The Atlantic. While he gave ideas of many technologies that we use today, such as the computer, scanner, digital camera and the nook or kindle, on the 12^th page he wrote of the memex. The memex was described as a piece of technology “ where one stores books, records, ands communication with flexibility and speed.” The memex was to look like a desk with a keyboard, buttons, and a lever. To me, this seems as the basic concept of a computer and hard drive. Tha hard drive of the computer stores a person’s files and folders. Today when a person uses a piece of technology, such as the Nook, they can store entire books and magazines on their computer’s hard drive. Bush goes on to say that information, like long stories, poems, and letters, can be added through an opening . Today this opening can be thought of s our modern scanners, where we send our physical documents to the computer. Bush also speaks of “the record” throughout his article. The record today might be one’s files and folders saved by a person on their hard drive. “The Record” might also be thought of as the internet, where virtually any information you are looking for can be found, just like Bush said of his memory rolodex.

The interactive writing space today differs from the writing space created by the printing press. In the From Gutenberg to Gates to Google article, Ian Jukes compares the five and a half century old printing press to the thirty five year old computer technology. Due to exponential growth, the use of writing and interacting through e-mail , interactive writing is growing at 1000 times the rate of conventional mail (p. 14, Jukes). Interactive writing space has also helped spiked the size of our dictionary. In 2005, there were 540,000 words in the English language. This number, according to Jukes, is 5 times as many words than there were in Shakespeare’s time. On pages 23 and 24 of Juke’s article, he brings up the point that the interactive writing space is more efficient. If breaking news `occurred during the times of the printing press after a newspaper had been published for a day, the editors would have to wait for the next day to print the story. Today, news can be added to newspaper’s websites at anytime. While interactive writing space is faster, holds more information as predicted by Bush, and is generally easier for younger generations, there are some similarities. The printing press was first created to print copies of the Bible for the masses. Since its conception, the printing press started to become used to spread information to the masses, just like the interactive writing space.

Technology has come a long way since Bush’s publication of As We May Think. The progression of this technology can most notably be seen in the changes from the printing press to an interactive writing space such as a Word document, E-Mail, or the Internet.