Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
"Yours for the Telling" by Raymond Queneau
-1973
-a kind of "choose your own adventure" in the form of footnotes underneath "Brief History of the Oulipo" by Jean Lescure.
-"'It would not seem that the composition of poems arising from a vocabulary composed by intersections, inventories, or any other process may constitute an end in itself.'"
-"...like mathematics, literature could be explored.
There are a few things that make this article particularly intriguing. First and foremost, "Yours for the Telling" is this weird little choose your own adventure blurb inserted at the bottom of a history of the Oulipo. Assuming this was an active decision on the Authors' part, what exactly does this insertion achieve? While the historical document is very interesting, the footnoted "Yours for the Telling" is actually more engaging. It establishes boundaries and gives the reader a minimal amount of power by simply offering 2 choices at each intersection. It's disgustingly simple, yet it's still more engrossing than the article itself.
Second, the historical article explores language as a set of limitations, which is something I feel like I've been raving about in this blog for months. And such limitation is illustrated beautifully. The author asks the reader to consider a stomachache. The word is incredibly vague and does absolutely nothing to convey the specific pain one feels when experiencing a "stomachache" beyond locating it to a general section of the human body. Furthermore, the article explores language as a concrete object, something to be manipulated and reworked to discover new modes of representation, to redefine/reconfigure perception.
Burroughs, in his article about the cut-up method, expresses similar ideas. Even if the object of language is made abstract, language itself is concrete enough for the human brain to try and cope, to attempt to decipher and find meaning in the object.
Yet, if language is an object, is it not subjected to the human projection of meaning? With physical objects, people make certain associations. A bicycle, as viewed/experienced by a person is not just a bicycle but also a hypertextual/metaphysical construction of the object based on memory and associated memory. Now to read the word "bicycle" has the exact same effect on human perception, including the mental fabrication of the image of a bicycle.
But language attempts to objectify some extremely abstract concepts such as human emotion, and in that sense, literary language could actually be too limiting, couldn't it?
So where do we go from here? What happens when we find that literary or even sensory language doesn't cut it?
Prediction:
You want to know exactly how I'm feeling emotionally? Send me a link to your emotional database. I'll forward it to you. Feel for yourself.
-a kind of "choose your own adventure" in the form of footnotes underneath "Brief History of the Oulipo" by Jean Lescure.
-"'It would not seem that the composition of poems arising from a vocabulary composed by intersections, inventories, or any other process may constitute an end in itself.'"
-"...like mathematics, literature could be explored.
There are a few things that make this article particularly intriguing. First and foremost, "Yours for the Telling" is this weird little choose your own adventure blurb inserted at the bottom of a history of the Oulipo. Assuming this was an active decision on the Authors' part, what exactly does this insertion achieve? While the historical document is very interesting, the footnoted "Yours for the Telling" is actually more engaging. It establishes boundaries and gives the reader a minimal amount of power by simply offering 2 choices at each intersection. It's disgustingly simple, yet it's still more engrossing than the article itself.
Second, the historical article explores language as a set of limitations, which is something I feel like I've been raving about in this blog for months. And such limitation is illustrated beautifully. The author asks the reader to consider a stomachache. The word is incredibly vague and does absolutely nothing to convey the specific pain one feels when experiencing a "stomachache" beyond locating it to a general section of the human body. Furthermore, the article explores language as a concrete object, something to be manipulated and reworked to discover new modes of representation, to redefine/reconfigure perception.
Burroughs, in his article about the cut-up method, expresses similar ideas. Even if the object of language is made abstract, language itself is concrete enough for the human brain to try and cope, to attempt to decipher and find meaning in the object.
Yet, if language is an object, is it not subjected to the human projection of meaning? With physical objects, people make certain associations. A bicycle, as viewed/experienced by a person is not just a bicycle but also a hypertextual/metaphysical construction of the object based on memory and associated memory. Now to read the word "bicycle" has the exact same effect on human perception, including the mental fabrication of the image of a bicycle.
But language attempts to objectify some extremely abstract concepts such as human emotion, and in that sense, literary language could actually be too limiting, couldn't it?
So where do we go from here? What happens when we find that literary or even sensory language doesn't cut it?
Prediction:
You want to know exactly how I'm feeling emotionally? Send me a link to your emotional database. I'll forward it to you. Feel for yourself.
"A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau
-1961
_"To enjoy A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems and allow this literary work to function as intended, please cut along the lines to allow any of 10 lines to occupy each of the 14 positions in the sonnet. Those too timid to operate on their books may wish to photocopy the pages and cut the photocopies. Cutting out a small gap between each strip will allow the strips to turn and be interchanged most easily."
-"Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine."
~Turing
Interesting. Beyond, simply using one or several audience members to complete a work of art, this "poem" requires that the reader actually construct a poem by following simple instructions and operating within boundaries established by the author. In many ways this isn't even literature. It's programming. Or something in between.
Let's consider this "potential literature" in terms of Turing's quote. The reader/writer is asked to interact with this "machine," and then what? Would you consider the poem you chose poetry? Would you consider yourself the author? Or do you simply become a part of the machine?
In the intro, Italo Calvino asserts that the art of it lies in deviation from the systematic process, in the insertion of personal and cultural experience.
There. "Personal and cultural experience." Is this really where the art lies in New Media? What happens when New Media is the vernacular, when emerging technologies are the vernacular? I've been considering the idea of folk (or naive or vernacular) art in a contemporary urban context, and what that might look like in a digital landscape.
How many creative movements have flown by on the world wide web, have been dismissed as stupid graphic trends?
Could Fail Blog be considered a gallery for artists of a VERY specific vernacular?
The computer has become a highly utilitarian and decorative medium. And while there's a lot of digital work out there that is academically informed and conceptually heavy, there's also quite a bit of creative digital work out there made to be used for very specific purposes, even decoration, that does not concern itself with the verbal language of those purposes. Is this the new Metropolitan Folk?
_"To enjoy A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems and allow this literary work to function as intended, please cut along the lines to allow any of 10 lines to occupy each of the 14 positions in the sonnet. Those too timid to operate on their books may wish to photocopy the pages and cut the photocopies. Cutting out a small gap between each strip will allow the strips to turn and be interchanged most easily."
-"Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine."
~Turing
Interesting. Beyond, simply using one or several audience members to complete a work of art, this "poem" requires that the reader actually construct a poem by following simple instructions and operating within boundaries established by the author. In many ways this isn't even literature. It's programming. Or something in between.
Let's consider this "potential literature" in terms of Turing's quote. The reader/writer is asked to interact with this "machine," and then what? Would you consider the poem you chose poetry? Would you consider yourself the author? Or do you simply become a part of the machine?
In the intro, Italo Calvino asserts that the art of it lies in deviation from the systematic process, in the insertion of personal and cultural experience.
There. "Personal and cultural experience." Is this really where the art lies in New Media? What happens when New Media is the vernacular, when emerging technologies are the vernacular? I've been considering the idea of folk (or naive or vernacular) art in a contemporary urban context, and what that might look like in a digital landscape.
How many creative movements have flown by on the world wide web, have been dismissed as stupid graphic trends?
Could Fail Blog be considered a gallery for artists of a VERY specific vernacular?
The computer has become a highly utilitarian and decorative medium. And while there's a lot of digital work out there that is academically informed and conceptually heavy, there's also quite a bit of creative digital work out there made to be used for very specific purposes, even decoration, that does not concern itself with the verbal language of those purposes. Is this the new Metropolitan Folk?
"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" by Theodor H. Nelson
-1965
-coined the word "hypertext" to signify "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper"
Nelson describes a system that is "multifarious, polymorphic, many-dimensional, [and]infinite." Understanding that the internet as we know it only embodies a fraction of his idea of hypertext, how must a system that embodies the definition fully operate?
I feel like it would include pretty much all of the technologies we've discussed thus far. It would be accessible anywhere at all times (maybe even to the point of digitally augmenting human perception and modes of communication?). I'm not entirely certain. The intro asserts that such a system would be difficult for an average web used to visualize. But I feel that many modes of human expression seek to more aptly articulate, even emulate, the human experience, so why should the world wide web not integrate spatial and temporal dimensions as perceived by the human being? I keep thinking about the scene in "Minority Report" where the protagonist is walking through a shopping center and each advertisement is speaking specifically to him. Take this idea a step further, and everything a person sees or hears is met with options to identify, relate to a bank of memories saved since birth, and modify.
Memories and ideas are available for filesharing. The internet can be used for much more than objective understanding. It could be used to relate more deeply to the people immediately around you and to expand your own subjective understanding.
-coined the word "hypertext" to signify "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper"
Nelson describes a system that is "multifarious, polymorphic, many-dimensional, [and]infinite." Understanding that the internet as we know it only embodies a fraction of his idea of hypertext, how must a system that embodies the definition fully operate?
I feel like it would include pretty much all of the technologies we've discussed thus far. It would be accessible anywhere at all times (maybe even to the point of digitally augmenting human perception and modes of communication?). I'm not entirely certain. The intro asserts that such a system would be difficult for an average web used to visualize. But I feel that many modes of human expression seek to more aptly articulate, even emulate, the human experience, so why should the world wide web not integrate spatial and temporal dimensions as perceived by the human being? I keep thinking about the scene in "Minority Report" where the protagonist is walking through a shopping center and each advertisement is speaking specifically to him. Take this idea a step further, and everything a person sees or hears is met with options to identify, relate to a bank of memories saved since birth, and modify.
Memories and ideas are available for filesharing. The internet can be used for much more than objective understanding. It could be used to relate more deeply to the people immediately around you and to expand your own subjective understanding.
"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott
-1964
-Ascott was reevaluating art with Weiner's cybernetics in mind
-Frank Popper makes a distinction between interaction and participation in art theory
Participation: involvement on the intellectual and behavioral level
Interaction: The artist stimulates a two-way interaction between the object and the viewer through which the viewers' questions are answered by the work itself
-"All are is, in some sense, didactic: every artist is, in some way, setting out to instruct. For, by instruction, we mean to give direction, and that is precisely what all great art does."
-"Symbollically, [the artist] takes on responsibility for absolute power and freedom to shape and create his world."
-"Cybernetic method may be characterised by a tendency to exteriorise its concepts in some solid form; to produce models in hardware of the natural or artificial system it is discussing. It is concerned with what things do, how they do them, and with the process within which they behave. It takes a dynamic view of life not unlike that of the artist."
The bulk of this article is concerned with the changes brought about by the widespread use of cybernetic technology; changes in the how we operate and interact with and within our environment. While this idea isn't very different from anything we've discussed thus far, it's interesting that this is the first we've read that proposes that artists actually utilize this kind of technology. Ascott foresaw how cybernetics could change the human condition and, as early as 1964, asserted that artists should be all over this.
And they should. Many of the technologies we've been exposed to thus far are presented primarily from an engineering standpoint, and while it is important to understand why a certain engineer came to a specific conclusion, it is also important to explore other capabilities of that technology beyond original intention. This is one of the things I really enjoyed about visiting Eyebeam. We just started looking at augmented reality technology a matter of months ago in class, and now, artists are using it for their own creative purposes. The speed at which we operate socially is absolutely phenomenal, and to know that we're in a time in which it doesn't take hundreds of years for an aesthetic style to spread just floors me.
-Ascott was reevaluating art with Weiner's cybernetics in mind
-Frank Popper makes a distinction between interaction and participation in art theory
Participation: involvement on the intellectual and behavioral level
Interaction: The artist stimulates a two-way interaction between the object and the viewer through which the viewers' questions are answered by the work itself
-"All are is, in some sense, didactic: every artist is, in some way, setting out to instruct. For, by instruction, we mean to give direction, and that is precisely what all great art does."
-"Symbollically, [the artist] takes on responsibility for absolute power and freedom to shape and create his world."
-"Cybernetic method may be characterised by a tendency to exteriorise its concepts in some solid form; to produce models in hardware of the natural or artificial system it is discussing. It is concerned with what things do, how they do them, and with the process within which they behave. It takes a dynamic view of life not unlike that of the artist."
The bulk of this article is concerned with the changes brought about by the widespread use of cybernetic technology; changes in the how we operate and interact with and within our environment. While this idea isn't very different from anything we've discussed thus far, it's interesting that this is the first we've read that proposes that artists actually utilize this kind of technology. Ascott foresaw how cybernetics could change the human condition and, as early as 1964, asserted that artists should be all over this.
And they should. Many of the technologies we've been exposed to thus far are presented primarily from an engineering standpoint, and while it is important to understand why a certain engineer came to a specific conclusion, it is also important to explore other capabilities of that technology beyond original intention. This is one of the things I really enjoyed about visiting Eyebeam. We just started looking at augmented reality technology a matter of months ago in class, and now, artists are using it for their own creative purposes. The speed at which we operate socially is absolutely phenomenal, and to know that we're in a time in which it doesn't take hundreds of years for an aesthetic style to spread just floors me.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
"Sketchpad" by Ivan Sutherland
-1963
-graphical ancestor of contemporary man-machine interaction and computer graphics.
-the screen as more than virtual paper
-first direct-manipulation interface
-images as objects
-"users can assemble complex objects out of previous constructions, from their personal library..."
The automatic update system Sutherland implements is pretty interesting. Change a single brick, and every identical brick follows suit. The system allows a user to easily change a complex construction. It could be argued that a complex construction is given the ability to build upon itself.
Also, one thing worth thinking about is how this compares to Burroughs's essay on the cut-up method. While Burroughs encourages a chaotic reworking of a given text or object in the pursuit of improvement, Sutherland's approach is systematic and simplifying. One seeks to deconstruct and undermine while the other proposes expand and fortify.
-graphical ancestor of contemporary man-machine interaction and computer graphics.
-the screen as more than virtual paper
-first direct-manipulation interface
-images as objects
-"users can assemble complex objects out of previous constructions, from their personal library..."
The automatic update system Sutherland implements is pretty interesting. Change a single brick, and every identical brick follows suit. The system allows a user to easily change a complex construction. It could be argued that a complex construction is given the ability to build upon itself.
Also, one thing worth thinking about is how this compares to Burroughs's essay on the cut-up method. While Burroughs encourages a chaotic reworking of a given text or object in the pursuit of improvement, Sutherland's approach is systematic and simplifying. One seeks to deconstruct and undermine while the other proposes expand and fortify.
Something I've been Thinking about Lately
A Yahoo! ad,
a Ryan Trecartin video in which the family is a corporate unit, personality can be up/downloaded, and online avatars operate independently of those who created them,
Zhu Yu and the contemporary avant garde in China,
and Star Trek's borgs.
It's intriguing that certain artists in China are allegedly practicing cannibalism as a means of creative expression. I watched a critical documentary on the subject called Beijing Swings, and some of the artists use it to draw a comparison to Chinese cultural-economic practices, while others seek to aid in the augmentation of human perception. Those who are re-imagining the human condition describe future-humans as a race that utilizes everything and everyone including our dead, a race that is able to accept death as a natural process but not as a final note.
At the same time, western culture seems to be focusing on translating experience into a digital format, on a dimension in which the distinction between the real and the virtual is made ambiguous. Should I want the internet to have my personality? Yahoo! seems to think I already do. And Trecartin evidently accepts it as a plausible premise.
Now, who here would like to be a borg?
Raise your hands.
And who here is fearful of the prospect?
Would love to hear feedback on this one.
a Ryan Trecartin video in which the family is a corporate unit, personality can be up/downloaded, and online avatars operate independently of those who created them,
Zhu Yu and the contemporary avant garde in China,
and Star Trek's borgs.
It's intriguing that certain artists in China are allegedly practicing cannibalism as a means of creative expression. I watched a critical documentary on the subject called Beijing Swings, and some of the artists use it to draw a comparison to Chinese cultural-economic practices, while others seek to aid in the augmentation of human perception. Those who are re-imagining the human condition describe future-humans as a race that utilizes everything and everyone including our dead, a race that is able to accept death as a natural process but not as a final note.
At the same time, western culture seems to be focusing on translating experience into a digital format, on a dimension in which the distinction between the real and the virtual is made ambiguous. Should I want the internet to have my personality? Yahoo! seems to think I already do. And Trecartin evidently accepts it as a plausible premise.
Now, who here would like to be a borg?
Raise your hands.
And who here is fearful of the prospect?
Would love to hear feedback on this one.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
"From Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart
-1962
-Engelbart invented the mouse, the window, and the word processor and the hyperlink (independantly of Ted Nelson).
-helped establish the Internet, investigated computer-supported cooperative work, demonstrated videoconferencing and mixed text/graphic displays, created structured programming editors and used remote procedure calls
-1) complexity of human problems increasing more rapidly that our ability to cope
2) dealing with new and complex problems might be best be done by younger engineers
3) text/graphic interface
-simultaneous, continuous cooperation
Engelbart went to work at the Stanford Research Institute and pursued funds for the augmentation research program.
-ideas often portrayed as science fiction. (!)
This seems to be the first excerpts we've read thus far that illustrates an active push to...well...augment human intellect. All of the art, media, and technologies we've been presented with thus far have given me plenty of food for thought as to how all of this is changing our perception of the physical realm, but to hear that this was, to at least one person, the desired reaction completely blows my mind. The fact that he was proposing to ACTIVELY "pursu[e] new opportunities for evolving our language and methodologies" is, in a way, rather frightening.
How must Engelbart view the way we operate now? He demonstrated a text/graphic interface, and now we're walking around, regularly and frequently interacting with touch screens, and lamenting any lapse in the immediacy or ubiquity or portability of our tools. Spoken language actually limits us, reduces our efficiency and productivity. Why spend the time describing a beautiful work of architecture when you can send a link to a 3D virtual reconstruction that utilizes thousands of photographs posted online?
I find it intriguing that many of Engelbart's ideas are illustrated through science fiction. On the one hand, Engelbart has absolutely proven himself to be a successful engineer, what with all of the tools he's created. On the other hand, the fact that he conveys his ideas through creative means also gives him a very strong humanist edge. For him to straddle that line between humanist and engineer affords him the power not only to make a human life faster and smoother but also to reconfigure the human condition entirely.
-Engelbart invented the mouse, the window, and the word processor and the hyperlink (independantly of Ted Nelson).
-helped establish the Internet, investigated computer-supported cooperative work, demonstrated videoconferencing and mixed text/graphic displays, created structured programming editors and used remote procedure calls
-1) complexity of human problems increasing more rapidly that our ability to cope
2) dealing with new and complex problems might be best be done by younger engineers
3) text/graphic interface
-simultaneous, continuous cooperation
Engelbart went to work at the Stanford Research Institute and pursued funds for the augmentation research program.
-ideas often portrayed as science fiction. (!)
This seems to be the first excerpts we've read thus far that illustrates an active push to...well...augment human intellect. All of the art, media, and technologies we've been presented with thus far have given me plenty of food for thought as to how all of this is changing our perception of the physical realm, but to hear that this was, to at least one person, the desired reaction completely blows my mind. The fact that he was proposing to ACTIVELY "pursu[e] new opportunities for evolving our language and methodologies" is, in a way, rather frightening.
How must Engelbart view the way we operate now? He demonstrated a text/graphic interface, and now we're walking around, regularly and frequently interacting with touch screens, and lamenting any lapse in the immediacy or ubiquity or portability of our tools. Spoken language actually limits us, reduces our efficiency and productivity. Why spend the time describing a beautiful work of architecture when you can send a link to a 3D virtual reconstruction that utilizes thousands of photographs posted online?
I find it intriguing that many of Engelbart's ideas are illustrated through science fiction. On the one hand, Engelbart has absolutely proven himself to be a successful engineer, what with all of the tools he's created. On the other hand, the fact that he conveys his ideas through creative means also gives him a very strong humanist edge. For him to straddle that line between humanist and engineer affords him the power not only to make a human life faster and smoother but also to reconfigure the human condition entirely.
"The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin" by Bill Burroughs
-1961
-rearranging a text can result in a new text with potential for unexpected meaning
-"Cut-ups are for everybody."
There are quite a few interesting concepts in this short essay.
The idea that anyone can do a cut up and that the result can still be artful is pretty punk, and in this, Burroughs is ahead of his time. Secondly, in the last paragraph before Burroughs demonstrates the cut-up method, he notes that the method could be used in game theory and military strategy to add an element of randomness.
The cut-up method seems incredibly relevant to contemporary practice. People are going nuts over intellectual property rights all because of the simplicity and profound power of the copy/paste function. Movements in music and visual arts are entirely based on appropriating and remixing.
Collage isn't entirely new, but is collage (in music, art, or literature) necessarily the only result of remixing something?
-rearranging a text can result in a new text with potential for unexpected meaning
-"Cut-ups are for everybody."
There are quite a few interesting concepts in this short essay.
The idea that anyone can do a cut up and that the result can still be artful is pretty punk, and in this, Burroughs is ahead of his time. Secondly, in the last paragraph before Burroughs demonstrates the cut-up method, he notes that the method could be used in game theory and military strategy to add an element of randomness.
The cut-up method seems incredibly relevant to contemporary practice. People are going nuts over intellectual property rights all because of the simplicity and profound power of the copy/paste function. Movements in music and visual arts are entirely based on appropriating and remixing.
Collage isn't entirely new, but is collage (in music, art, or literature) necessarily the only result of remixing something?
"Computing Machinery" by Alan Turing
-1950
-Turing test
-"Can a computer...fool a person into believing it is human?"
-posed to philosophers rather than computer scientists for the purposes of challenging their notions of intelligence.
-describes a computer than can converse fluidly
I read this essay last year in a philosophy course. And it does pose an interesting question: how do we define intelligence? If a person can hold a believable conversation with a computer, could it be said that the computer is thinking? One might say that a distinction must be made between computing and thinking, but that isn't really the question at hand. Rather, the question pertains to how we perceive the objects with which we are interacting.
At what point can we say that our computers are intelligent? Must they be fallible? Is THAT a prerequisite for intelligence? Do they have to be able to offer an opinion? Must they emote?
Maybe it's the absence of will that helps us to believe that they are not intelligent. A person can have a relatively fluid conversation with a computer, but can a computer start a conversation?
-Turing test
-"Can a computer...fool a person into believing it is human?"
-posed to philosophers rather than computer scientists for the purposes of challenging their notions of intelligence.
-describes a computer than can converse fluidly
I read this essay last year in a philosophy course. And it does pose an interesting question: how do we define intelligence? If a person can hold a believable conversation with a computer, could it be said that the computer is thinking? One might say that a distinction must be made between computing and thinking, but that isn't really the question at hand. Rather, the question pertains to how we perceive the objects with which we are interacting.
At what point can we say that our computers are intelligent? Must they be fallible? Is THAT a prerequisite for intelligence? Do they have to be able to offer an opinion? Must they emote?
Maybe it's the absence of will that helps us to believe that they are not intelligent. A person can have a relatively fluid conversation with a computer, but can a computer start a conversation?
"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush
-1945
-Director of Office of Scientific Research and Development
Benefits of Science
-increased control of material environment
-increased knowledge of biological. physiological and psychological processes
-swifter communication
*expresses demand for speed, accessibility, portability, cost efficiency, mechanization, universality, and versatility
It's interesting to look at the inventions in this article and think about how they would hold up today. On the one hand, some of them seem too simple. Many of them perform one or few functions, resulting in a cumbersome pile of objects with which a person is expected to interact throughout the day. Now, we have access to tools that perform several functions such as the iphone, digital Swiss Army knives that give us access to the worldbank of human knowledge.
On the other hand, many of Bush's ideas are just starting to be put into practice. The introduction mentions Bush's "trails" as an invention that would be incredibly useful, one that would essentially follow and supplement a human's train of thought by approaching it as a hypertext.
A wikipedia article on his Memex machine notes that it wasn't until the use of wiki and social software that people could trace their trajectory and share it.
But it IS happening. With sites like delicious and tools like google wave, one can trace and share his/her trajectory and post it publicly, even hold a conversation in hypertext.
The data is there. It just needs to be framed.
Now. What would happen if we were to take that kind of software, the kind that can trace our trajectories, and apply it to brainscan technology?
And does our desire to hold conversations in hypertext not demonstrate that language, alone, is not enough?
-Director of Office of Scientific Research and Development
Benefits of Science
-increased control of material environment
-increased knowledge of biological. physiological and psychological processes
-swifter communication
*expresses demand for speed, accessibility, portability, cost efficiency, mechanization, universality, and versatility
It's interesting to look at the inventions in this article and think about how they would hold up today. On the one hand, some of them seem too simple. Many of them perform one or few functions, resulting in a cumbersome pile of objects with which a person is expected to interact throughout the day. Now, we have access to tools that perform several functions such as the iphone, digital Swiss Army knives that give us access to the worldbank of human knowledge.
On the other hand, many of Bush's ideas are just starting to be put into practice. The introduction mentions Bush's "trails" as an invention that would be incredibly useful, one that would essentially follow and supplement a human's train of thought by approaching it as a hypertext.
A wikipedia article on his Memex machine notes that it wasn't until the use of wiki and social software that people could trace their trajectory and share it.
But it IS happening. With sites like delicious and tools like google wave, one can trace and share his/her trajectory and post it publicly, even hold a conversation in hypertext.
The data is there. It just needs to be framed.
Now. What would happen if we were to take that kind of software, the kind that can trace our trajectories, and apply it to brainscan technology?
And does our desire to hold conversations in hypertext not demonstrate that language, alone, is not enough?
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