(Techniques speaker series)
Animating
(When)
March 19, 2019
Doors Open at 5:00 pm
Talk at 6:00 pm
(Location)
Social Hall, 715 S McClintock Drive
Tempe, AZ 85281, USA
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, As We May Think, has been widely heralded, especially by the pioneers of hypertext, as the beginning of computer-supported-cooperative work of interface theory — condensed into his proposal for a device called the memex to help researchers search, record, analyze, and communicate information.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, characterized his vision of a sea of interactive shared knowledge, as one in which computers are memexes whose knowledge base exists in cyberspace rather than microfilm. Building on such accounts, I propose to explore Bush’s radical transformation in the situation of knowledge — the problem of lateral connections. The lateral problem is fundamentally different from the horizontal problem that characterizes the classical knowledge of 18th century — what Foucault calls “horizontal deployments,” such as the table and the grid. It also differs from the modern disciplinary knowledge of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which Foucault characterizes in terms of “obscure verticality.”
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, As We May Think, has been widely heralded, especially by the pioneers of hypertext, as the beginning of computer-supported-cooperative work of interface theory — condensed into his proposal for a device called the memex to help researchers search, record, analyze, and communicate information.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, characterized his vision of a sea of interactive shared knowledge, as one in which computers are memexes whose knowledge base exists in cyberspace rather than microfilm. Building on such accounts, I propose to explore Bush’s radical transformation in the situation of knowledge — the problem of lateral connections. The lateral problem is fundamentally different from the horizontal problem that characterizes the classical knowledge of 18th century — what Foucault calls “horizontal deployments,” such as the table and the grid. It also differs from the modern disciplinary knowledge of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which Foucault characterizes in terms of “obscure verticality.”