Week 2 Response!
clare coyne
For this week’s reading, I started with the 1945 article, seeing that it would be appropriate to go in chronological order. The essay, “As We May Think”, by Vannevar Bush is quite ahead of its time; speculating about the future of technology, and critiquing the present in a somewhat cynical way. Similar to all of the impactful wars following, the Second World war was a time of discovery and mass technological advancement for scientists. However, in 1945 with the war ending, Vannevar Bush wondered: what was to come for the scientific community?
I found it extremely interesting when he talked about the idea of extending the human memory, and the human ability to catalogue, categorize, and recollect all of human information in existence. This idea must have been shocking at this time, and might be why today we have so much technology dedicated to storage of information. Bush states “Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual”. With the ability to preserve information far beyond the lifespan of any individual, the problem then arises of how to access and circulate that information in a valuable way.
The second, shorter article was a more modern take on a related issue: how can we, as web users, preserve and protect the web? Tim Berners-Lee talks about how important it really is to keep the morals of the worldwide web intact, or else the internet might fall into chaos. Thinking in terms right now, ten years after this article was written, I can see how this argument holds true. The thing is, you can basically say whatever you want on the internet, and so can billions of other people, so what is holding it together? It’s a little scary to think that the internet could just collapse on top of itself (especially for frequent internet users like myself) if the morality of its users lessens.