MEMEX TWO POINT OH
It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I’ve been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I’ve been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our communication and social context all wrapped up in knowledge. Social networking is contemporary knowledge machined into media trails.
Whatever “social networking” becomes, Twitter today, who knows tomorrow, we can still be sure that Vannevar Bush was one of the first to fantasize about the business of socially mediating knowledge through machines via exchangeable, reconfigurable machine-readable media (i.e. beyond books and paper).
The #IPF09 Internet as a Factory and Playground Conference at The New School, conferred by Trebor Scholz, discusses the notions of value creation in the networked wealth of a distributed and highly creative, productive, efficient human at work. Vannevar Bush has not been mentioned at the sessions I’ve attended, but a new discovery included Constant’s New Babylon project, perhaps the architectural parallel of the Memex.