July 14 – Compare and contrast the articles by Bush, Engelbart and McLuhan. What is the central theme of the three pieces?
The central theme of the three articles by Bush Engelbart and McLuhan is that the wealth of human knowledge, coupled with the technology now available to us can help shape our world now and in the future. As Vannevar Bush put it in his landmark article: “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Those words were published in 1945 and how right he was! His work laid the foundation for many other scholars. His predictions about what was to come in the future were amazingly spot on, in theory if not in actual practice. He wrote about the compression of information and his vision for a desk-like machine that would allow people in the future to readily pull information together from disparate sources. He mused that “selection (of this info) by association rather than indexing may yet be mechanized.” His description of the “memex” eerily described a computer that had not yet been invented. He also wrote about the importance of connecting ideas: “The process of tying the two together is the important thing. He also described an encyclopedia that would constantly be amended and would offer trails to other related material. He could have been describing wikipedia!
Doug Englebart was inspired by Bush’s article and it helped define his life’s work. Bush had spent much of his early career utilizing science for warfare, and the landmark 1945 article was his attempt to move beyond this war mindset and harness science for a better good. Englebart had an even more idealized vision of how human knowledge could be harnessed and was a vocal proponent of using computers and networks to solve the world’s problems. This attempt to harness the collective intellect facilitated by computers became his life’s work. Both Engelbart and Bush focussed on the associations and connections between information and believed that it was in those connections that problems would be solved.
Marshall McLuhan is most famous for his “the medium is the message” mantra. His work centered on how we lived in a global village made possible by technology and he believed that the message itself was not really important, but rather the vehicle for transporting it was. In this manner his approach and philosophy is much different than Bush and Engelbart because they believed that information and connections to be made from that information were the key. The technological mechanisms for making that happen were just tools. McLuhan sees the tools, whether it’s radio or TV or computers being the primary concern. “The personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by any new technologies.”
65 years after “As we may think” was published, Bush’s vision continues to be realized. The networks and hypertext technology pioneered in Engelbart’s lab are still relevant and continue to evolve. McLuhan’s believes we are rapidly approaching what he calls the extension of man – “the technological simulation of consciousness when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”
