In class today, we’ll be talking about “As We May Think,” Vanevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. I’ve also assigned H. G. Wells’ earlier (1937) “World Brain” and Michael Buckland’s article on the near forgotten inventor of a pre-Memex Memex, Emanuel Goldberg, who had most all of what Bush dreamed of already working in the 1920s.
To my mind, Wells better grasped the potential social use of shared knowledge than Bush, while Goldberg operationalized the Memex concepts so much earlier (and I would say from most of my background readings better) than Bush.
My journalism collegue Val Lauder sends a story about a too observant feathered biorecorder that somehow seems to relate.
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