When I first read As We May Think* as a teenager, I was astonished by how much it predicted of the computer age in 1945—but recently I’ve been feeling wistful about some pieces it predicts which never came to pass. [thread]
* theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
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Bush recognized that we think associatively. He thought we’d amplify creative work by building and navigating associative trails across materials. Many see this as predicting the WWW, but on a web site, you can only consume the links the author put there; you can’t add your own.
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Some people think this observation means Bush predicted the wiki. Yes, on a wiki, you can add a link to the text yourself… but that link would appear for _everyone._ There’s no notion of _personal_ associative markup.
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Bush’s associations are bidirectional, while web links are one-way. I suspect bidirectional links make much more sense in a personal context than in contexts where all links must be shared by all; that may be part of why the web’s have stayed unidirectional.
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And of course, even that’s just the web. What about associations between pages of an ebook and a paragraph of a PDF? Between an email from a colleague and some drawings it reminded me of?
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Bush also suggested that this web of links wouldn’t just be between others’ published works—that subordinates your own work to others’. Your own materials (drawings, drafts, voice recordings, etc) are also stops on the associative “trail.”
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If you want to arrange your own works relative to a disparate collection of others’ works, modern OSes offer folders and tags instead of links. In many cases, these are better: many associations form a clique or a tree, not a trail as Bush emphasizes.
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OS-level tags solve a problem Bush observes: that indexing systems usually assume there’s a “best” categorization of an item, but they often have many associations. You want many-to-many. But tagging a 100-page PDF or a 100-comp PSD isn’t very helpful. Memex links are page-level!
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But tags and folders are just sets. The structure is unordered, but your associations usually aren’t. It’s not just a theoretical problem: tags/folders are jumbled messes after a couple dozen items. Probably certain files are higher “degree,” but you’ll never know.
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Bush also describes how you could acquire trails from others—another notion we’re missing. Others’ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleague’s associative structures alongside your own, on the same files.
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Are there any good analyses of the structural reasons why we’re here and not there? Key problems with associative linking as attempted in past large-scale systems, etc? Other interesting attempts besides Xanadu? LiquidText is neat; fun to imagine OS-level adaptations… [fin]
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i’m working on a personal system for this designed for writers, inspired by bush and the promise of hypertext
as for structural reasons — designers don’t seem to do their reading 📖
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Neat! I look forward to seeing. That latter point does seem to be true more often than I'd like, unfortunately.
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My idea is that a global database, or at least a directory, will emerge that catalogues chronological diaries of "experiments" in all areas of life that are freely shared for the purposes of both science and entertainment. (top right circle)
Basically a how-to for everything.
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And, presumably, each element in the story of how someone got from here to there would be hyperlinked to other stories, so that we could follow one and split off to another, and another, infinitely.
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I found ‘s Dataspace musings to be a neat exploration of what “there” could look like: natecull.org/wordpress/2017
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Speaking purely personally, I find that other people’s mind maps etc associational representations to be reliably incomprehensible, and mine never make any sense to anyone else until I do the work to turn them into something more narrative
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probably comes closest here, and some people do use it sort of like that (fanfiction etc), although I rarely use it that way precisely because others’ cataloging schemata are rarely mine
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Tags are very underused throughout imho... I also never understood why, but I guess many-to-many is harder in general?
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Still waiting for someone to reboot Third Voice but with personal/social network filters on annotations
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