MemexPlex as New Media
This is a survey of New Media memes throughout history, with comments on each in how it relates to MemexPlex.
Part of
12 memes in this schema
The Printing Press is the Messiah
The printing press has come like a true Messiah to emancipate the great family of mankind from this double yoke. This Messiah is immortal, and its saving powers must be universal and perpetual. By this, and by no other Messiah, can man be saved from ignorance and misery; the only hell that he has to fear. It will…
Ruling in Favor of Google Books
In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences,while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research…
More Scientific Papers are Published Than Can Possibly be Read
We should admit in theory what is already very largely a case in practice, that the main currency of scientific information is the secondary sources in the forms of abstracts, reports, tables, &c., and that the primary sources are only for detailed reference by very few people. It is possible that the fate of most…
Digital Culture Turns Everything into One Book
The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is…
Writing as Quilting
This book is crammed with original ideas—very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book…
Peter Norvig: From Books to Paragraphs
You look at Knuth's original Literate Programming, and he's really trying to say, "What's the best order for writing a book," assuming that someone's going to read the whole book and he wants it to be in a logical order. People don't do that anymore. They don't want to read a book, they want an index so they can say…
Consumption of Media Has Moved to Bits and Pieces
The problem is: We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and…
No Book Will Be an Island
Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and…
How Brian Eno's Mind has Changed Through Use of the Intenet
I notice that I now digest my knowledge as a patchwork drawn from a wider range of sources than I used to. I notice too that I am less inclined to look for joined-up finished narratives and more inclined to make my own collage from what I can find. I notice that I read books more cursorily — scanning them in the same…
An Antiquated Observation on Computer Memory Storage
The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may tore the parts that can be summarized most succinctly--the quantitative parts and the reference citations--but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered…
Vannsvar Bush's Memex Vision
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential…
Cut-And-Paste Before Computers
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it…