Saving Information

“Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.”

 

            In 1945, Vannevar Bush published this statement in The Atlantic Monthly, which made me wonder if there were other concepts that just narrowly escaped oblivion and if there were others that weren’t as fortunate.

 

            In the days prior to the Internet, it becomes clear to me that the necessity of publications; with television in it’s developmental years and radio holding a small, steady following, newspapers and magazines were still an important medium used to communicate with the masses. Therefore, scientific journals were vital to the expansion of ideas and innovations in fields such as medicine and technology. Could it be possible, then, that vaccines and certain equipment were delayed to the inability to effectively reach a knowledgeable audience? 

 

            Such concerns seem outlandish with the capabilities of the information superhighway, but it’s interesting to note that there was once a time in which data could have simply been lost or discontinued. Blogs and online newspapers ensure that the people today are fed updated information at a pace that is unprecedented; and the process of saving such information is all but a click away. But what is the next step in the advancement of knowledge sharing and storage?

 

            How much faster will information be able to travel to and from the corners of the world? How much faster do we as a society need information to be able to travel? It seems to me that we are growing towards the implicit need for instant gratification in all forms of life – just look at the rates of text messages; the increased speed and affordability of cable internet; the clock speeds of processors in computers.

 

            When will I be able to eliminate the time it takes for these questions to bridge the gap between my head and the keyboard?

 

The Internet: Predictions vs. Reality

Reading Bush’s description of a “Memex” is a reminder of how far we’ve come in a relatively short time period. To him, the device was a far-off technological miracle, but to me it seems quaintly antiquated. Bush envisioned what we now know as the Internet as a device roughly the size of a desk, for which you could purchase information on microfilm. The reality, however, is that we can now hold the Internet literally in the palm of our hand, with practically anything you could ever want to know accessible through increasingly small and portable gadgets. Best of all, the information itself is free of charge. Additionally, Bush did not imagine that the Memex would be interactive. It would store and recall notations made by its owner, but each machine would only be able to access the paths that were created on it. The Internet is much more collaborative. Sites such as Diigo allow users to highlight and annotate the web pages they browse, but they also allow users to see what notes have been made by others. Search engines such as Google arrange their findings according to algorithms that take into account both the paths that the individual user has created and the results that have gotten the most hits from other users searching for the same key words. What Bush failed to predict was that the “Memex” would eventually connect users not only to information, but to each other.

Reading Bush’s article reminded me in some ways of George Orwell’s 1984. When Orwell wrote his dystopian classic, that year had been very far off and open to speculation. As someone who hadn’t even existed yet when that year passed, I found the book very strange the first time I read it because I know that the actual year 1984 was nothing like Orwell predicted. It was odd for me to think that what I view as the not-so-distant past was once seen as futuristic and far-off. I felt the same way reading about early speculation regarding the Internet, which has been part of my everyday life since late childhood. However, both the book and the article have given me an interesting insight into how things I take for granted were initially viewed with a sense of wonder and awe.

HTTP, more than just letters.

        I actually find it quite humorous that even a few years ago, people were just learning how to use the internet for its loveliness.  The Berners-Lee article, “The World Wide Web” was almost shocking to me.  Who knew there was so much complexity to the different, little parts of the internet; HTML, HTTP, URL?  These aren’t just abbreviations for they are letters that stand for something important which was difficult to perfect.  However, the way the World Wide Web is described in this article, doesn’t even seen archaic to me.  It seems like someone is trying to describe something so simple, in such technical terms.  Growing up with the internet by my side, I never had to learn the definitions of HTML or other seemingly simple internet terms.  I didn’t have to know exactly what they meant.  All I had to know was that if you wanted to go on a website, you had to put HTTP in front of the URL link that you typed in the empty box.  Although the end of the article promises an exciting future for the internet, I can’t help but wonder how excited people must have been to realize the effects the internet could have.  Not only its effects, but its abilities.  Vannevar Bush mentioned in his article, “As We May Think” (1945), the ideas of compressing an entire encyclopedia to a minuscule amount.  He talked about a desk with screens of information at the click of a button.  In a way, my generation takes the internet and all of its abilities and effects on our society for granted.  If you try to think about how much information is online, it is pretty close to unfathomable.  They weren’t lying when they said we had the world at our fingertips.

    Also, “Doug Englebart’s 1968 Demonstration” videos were either terrible quality or in their beginning stages.  We’ll pretend that the videos were good quality for their time.  I couldn’t help but think of a Saturday Night Live episode where one of the comedians is a news anchor in the TV station, and one is out at the site of the report.  The news anchors keeps asking the reporter questions, but everything is delayed and their conversations get overlapped.  The reporter can’t hear any questions she is being asked.  Eventually, the two just give up and the audience, including myself, laughs at their frustration.  These videos seemed to lag so much that it was hard to keep up with what was going on.  Listening wasn’t as bad as trying to figure out what was going on on the screen.  The example of early word processing, a keyboard and a mouse, were so much in their beginning stages that I could barely recognize what was going on.  However, let’s thank God that Doug Englebart and the people who created all of these technologies didn’t just give up like the SNL comedians.