The Memex

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. *Bush sees the potential for a device used for both information and communications. He probably assumed it would be a tool for holding the records of communication rather than being directly involved as a tool for communicative purposes. **Bush omits addressing the possibility that such a device could be used to create art. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. *We now call this linking. The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. *The contemporary memex has materialized as a shared collection of information (be it your personal hard drive, the databases of Google, Wikipedia or the internet as a whole). Most information is available free to all those with an access point (personal computing device). Bush's memex was the access point and storage location for the data, but today the memex has been developed upon by allowing the data to be held in a location separate from the personal device. Information can of course be stored on the hard drive of the computer, but accessing remote information is a now a highly desirable and prevalent option. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. *Searching "why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades" in Google's database will produce over four thousand results, not just dozens. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. *Wikipedia. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. *More Wikipedia. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. *Bush imagines the potentially pretentious process where a user adds personal comments and links to an existing document to personalize and better understand it.  When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. *Side trails are probably those most frequently followed by many internet users. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him. And his trails do not fade. *My history currently displays all of the many trails I followed to collect random links for the previous star. Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. *Without this new easily navigable encyclopedia Bush postulates, complete with a search option and myriad hyperlinks, finding the many informational links I used in this assignment would have taken much longer, and been less aesthetically and informationally universalized.