The first few essays in the
New Media Reader play into our discussion of how long before the internet, brilliant minds were conjuring up the ideas that would become it and other sorts of new media. I was particularly impressed with Vannevar Bush's
As We May Think, and the ways in which we know see that his vision has inspired new media of today. Bush pushed the idea of "the scholar creating links and pathways through… information--associative connections that attempt to partially reflect the 'intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.'" His then revolutionary concept of the
"memex," which must have seemed almost crazy when he published the essay in 1945, lays out so many precursors for personal computers, digital cameras, the "screenshot," and Amazon's latest digital book storage device, the
kindle. and more. It is wild to think how insightful Bush was, so long before any such inventions. He even seems to suggest the invention of an
Eye Toy-like headset, and beyond. His essay also indirectly led to the inventions of the mouse, word processor, and hyperlink. Crazy.
Alan Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence tackles the question of a thinking machine and establishes the possibility of verbal computers beyond the notion at his time that computers were mere number crunchers. Turing's "initiation game" reminds me of this Aim-bot, whose screen name I cannot for the life of me remember, who one used to be able to add to an AOL Instant Messenger buddy list and ask it questions. In middle school, my friends and I would sometimes send it messages testing its ability to "think." I don't remember if we ever stumped the bot…
Norbert Weiner's "Men, Machines, and the World About" focused on the study of "communication and control in the animal and machine." It was interesting to see how, from his discussion of cybernetics, we had words such as "cyborg" and even "cyberspace" added to our vocabulary. He also brought relevance to such now common technological words as "feedback," "input," and "output." It is always a trip to see where things that are so obvious, and even mundane actually came from.
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