Vannevar Bush and the memex

from Emily Setina, Howard Rheingold student at Baylor

When Bush uses the phrase “reacquire the privilege of forgetting,” he is looking forward to a gift that technology, rather than its absence, might bring. As technology advances, life may become simpler, may become something more like the past (we “reacquire” something lost). As a privilege (rather than a liability or lapse), forgetting sounds nice, as nice as any freedom I gain by losing my internet for a morning hour, and as paradoxical in its economy of gain through loss. Baudelaire, in his famously scathing review of the Paris Salon of 1849, admitted that photography, which he otherwise despised, might be useful in a way similar to that Bush imagines: by taking up the burden of memory, serving as its “humble handmaid,” photography could, according to Baudelaire, free the artist to create.

But Bush is of course interested not only or primarily in the possibility of the record but its organization. I have been writing about what another French writer, Marcel Proust, thought about the value of photography as a record of the past and as an analogy for how human memory works. Proust at one point in his three-thousand-page novel describes a mind cluttered with more experiences than it can reflect upon: that mind, he writes, is like a photographic darkroom littered with undeveloped negatives. For Proust, the reflection that would develop the negative is the reflection that only the artist performs, that turns that experience into art. Like the system that Bush describes, in Proust art organizes and provides a way to access experience, pulling it out of the clutter, allowing one finally to forget because what is forgotten can be easily re-accessed, remembered. While in Proust it is art—defined as the creative transformation of personal experience—that provides structure, Bush imagines this structure as the legacy of a researcher, ordering disciplinary rather than personal history. But this ordering is also personal, for what the disciple inherits is a structure of thought: “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

For Bush, as for Proust, thinking about technology means thinking about thinking. When he pushes furthest in his imagining, Bush wonders if we will someday be able to bypass the senses in our record-keeping: “All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses—the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?” I was interested though in the way that Bush’s memex blends the new and the old. As he imagines it, rather than eliminating our familiar modes of recording, it might mimic them: “it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme. . . just as though he had the physical page before him.” With or without a working internet connection, my desk is also hybrid. I transcribe here, on a MacBook Pro Word document that mimics a typed page, notes I took while reading a book made of paper, underlining with a pencil (wooden, somewhat dull, worn eraser).

Besides the sense and senses of record-keeping, the other issue that I come back to in thinking about “As We May Think” is chance and what its role might be in the more perfect library that Bush imagines. With more trails through the maze of available materials, we have more chances to make and to share chance discoveries: http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/