Bush VS Hawthorne

I believe Dr. Vannevar Bush related his theory better to the internet in general, and my blog, rather than Nathaniel Hawthorne. To me it seemed that Bush’s reading made more sense, and was easier to follow than Hawthorne’s. Also it seemed that Bush was more creative, opened minded, and his memex was closely related to the computer. For me Hawthorne’s Fire-Worship was a piece of writing that related things to nature.
Bush and Hawthorne have two very different ways of looking at the situation. I do not believe that in either case it is a threat to anyone’s life. Hawthorne talks about the sunshine, nature, people’s bright face, and about domestic life. In Fire-Worship he basically relates most everything to nature in some way. In section two in Bush’s “As We May Think,” he talks about the camera and how they have been used just like our blog, to keep records of things going on in our life. “Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop” (Bush). Photography is just like the internet, it not going to stop. It is only going to expand more and more into the future. It shows us that it is not a threat to society, but that it has helped the demand of the fast growing population we are in today. People want to have to world at there hands and they love that the internet gives them just that. I’m sure it has hurt use in some ways you mostly hear more of the good news than bad.
“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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” (Bush). Before the memex, “when data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature” (Bush). Bush’s dream of the memex is a good understanding of the internet. The memex had many features as well as the Internet does. There is such a growing mountain of research, and it’s getting bigger and bigger by the years. The memex was a device much like our internet today. It’s your own personal library, like we talked about in class. People don’t go to the library as much as they did years ago. Most all people have a computer and can do there research from home. Computers today are more efficient than say a type writer was. You have spell check and all this neat stuff on computers and when people were using type writers, which was not that long ago, I’m sure it was hard to catch all your mistakes and type it over who knows how many times.
My blogs relationship to Bush’s memex is how it links relates text and it can show illustrations. Just like the memex, my information that I put on the blog is stored on my page and is there for later reference or use. You can do things on the blog such as post photographs links or anything that you would like. With Hawthorne’s Fire-Worship it was harder for me to find the relationship between the wood stove and my blog. At the end of the Fire-Worship he clams to fight for you stove and I related that to my blog. On a blog you are free to write whatever is on your mind, and you have a right to fight for your freedom on there. It’s a way to express your feelings and some may say it’s a way of reaching out to others. Therefore I believe that the internet and blogging seem to be a realization of Bush's dream of the memex. It is not a threat to social and domestic life like Hawthorne sees in his new-fangled wood stove.



Bush, Vannever, “As We May Think” The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945. http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml. Simon Fraser University, August 1995