Today I strolled through our internal instance of System One, a hivemind of things happening in and around the company and a true treasure chest of inspiration, and stumbled across a familiar piece about Vannevar Bush's Memex. I think the written piece of visionary Bush has been linked, discussed, cited and referenced an awful lot of times and still it remains one of those rare pieces that appear to be timeless and never to old to be considered.

In his 1945 article "As we may think" for the Atlantic Monthly Vannevar Bush coined the term Memex to describe a future 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. His vision was quite tangible, as he envisioned the "Memetic Extender" as a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which the person works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Bush's vision must have seemed unmanageable then, although he argued that everything used for his memex was conventional at that time and by using microfilm a sort of Memex could have probably been built. It seems as if Bush was not the first one to think of such a device using microfilm, as H. G. Wells proposed a Permanent World Encyclopedia in 1937. So the idea of Wikipedia is not that new.



What makes his article and his vision so inspiring is not the store everything paradigm, but his clear view on the main challenge of such a tool:

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 feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item. Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

He described the problem of linking various content pieces (nowadays sometimes called microcontent) to produce associations that help in the organisation and retrieval of information long before Hypertext, the World Wide Web or the Semantic Web were part of computer science. What makes us humans superior to other species is, that we are able and make wide use of our ability to link things mentally. The idea did reappear quite often in the history of computer science, Kay and Goldberg called it a "dynabook" in the late 1960s and probably we are closer now than ever to the initial vision.

In 1976 Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The selfish Gene and described information pieces called Memes (Singular: Meme, rhymes with dream), short for Memetic Memory as an analogy to genes). In his model, Memes represent parts of ideas, languages, skills, moral values and everything that we learn, transform and pass on to others. Memes travel along individuals of a society, leading to a Meme Pool representing all Memes currently available in a given population. Memes have the ability and the urge to replicate, creating a survival of the fittest climate along ideas. The Meme of Memetics (some kind of a metameme) took quite long to travel and disseminate, as it is only in the last decade that scientists around the world are adopting the new viewpoint of Darwinian evolution, building new theories, concepts or algorithms around it, in diverse fields such as learning organisations, innovation or financial management. Interestingly not only the words Meme and Memex seem to describe similar things, but the concept of Memes by Dawkins has many similarities to the device Bush proposed. Both are talking about small units of information that might be stored and replicated, and those units influencing our life. The way Memes achieve this is certainly more subtle, as they influence the infected people's behaviour so that they help perpetuate and spread the virus, whereas the Memex has the goal to assist people in recording, retrieving and sharing pieces of information, helping them to spread, remember or discover new Memes.

Now enough for the history lesson, the most intriguing question for me is: how do we manage to gain such radical insights as Bush and Dawkins. Both were ahead of their times, not being able to foresee the development that is so evident for us. How can something that has been written 1945 still be visionary in 2006, over 60 years later? How can we pull together pieces that are not obviously connected and then combine them to form something new? How do we use the Memes in the Memepool to be innovative?

That's what all the people mentioned and many others were capable of, Bush, Dawkins, Wells and of course Buckminster-Fuller, who had his Chronofile and would have loved to have a Memex.