The Machine

Vannevar Bush's historic paper, "As We May Think," gives a vision of the future of new media that is very interesting. One thing I found is that he was pretty accurate in his predictions, even if they weren't exact. For example, at the time Bush wrote the article, all photographs that were taken had to be wet, whether at the time of exposure or during the development stages. He predicted that eventually a new media would be introduced that allowed dry photography. This is basically what digital photography is. Anyone can use their phone and take a picture, then "develope" the photos by uploading them on a site like Facebook or Flickr.

This idea of new media making things much easier is similar to Kevin Kelly's ideas in the next 5000 days of the internet. Kelly says that the internet will be more personalized, and everything will be linked together. Therefore you don't have to tell different netorwks who all your friends are, the internet will already know. The downside of this would be that you will have to be willing to give your personal information to the internet. This is another area of the the future of new media that both articles agreed on.

In Bush's article, he stated that all of the new sciences and technologies will start out being used by scientists first. Eventually, these new technologies will spread and be manipulated by the mass public. This is similar to Kelly's assumption that the internet being linked and personalized will start out with a smaller number of users, then spread to everyone. As often discuss in class, having this "web presence" will be an integral part of humanity in the next 5000 days of the internet.

The main difference of the articles was the effects that new media is going to have on everyones minds. Bush says that new media is going to expand everyones mind, giving them more knowledge. The way I interpreted Kevin Kelly's lecture, he felt the opposite. By having everything done on the internet, people are going to become more transparent. Everything is going to become automated, and rather than providing the knowledge of how to actually do activities. In other words, if the internet ever went down, it would shut down society, which is exactly the opposite outcome of the original purpose for DARPA creating the internet.