Vannevar Bush and the WWW

Vannevar Bush:
I guess so. I saw trailblazing as a new profession that established "useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." It seemed like a noble research profession that would organize information for the human mind. Are there trailblazers out there on the Web today, Jim?

Jim Marinetti:
Well, I'm not sure, Vannevar. There are people out there designing the information that you see on the Web. They go by many names, like Information Designer. Some are more skilled than others, but the trails these people make are mostly intentional. A company named Yahoo! became very popular on the Web because it suggested trails for people to follow.

Bush works with his "integraph," a machine that could "think" for itself

Vannevar Bush:
But there aren't really trails...just indexes...or there are too many trails available at once. When I thought of the memex I thought of how the human mind thinks of one idea and then develops subsequent ideas. I guess I thought it would follow a linear order from one idea to the next. Sometimes people think about two things at once, but usually they follow a pattern of one-thing leads to the next. Most of the information on the Web seems to be organized differently. These Information Designers have arranged information hierarchically so that people can make choices - lots of choices at once - and find information quickly. That is all well and good, but it is really more useful for selling products than revealing thought processes. I talked before about how cumbersome it can be to follow a trail through subclasses of information. That is a machine organization, not necessarily a human associative process.

It seems like designers of the information on the Web are so concerned with providing people with choices that they aren't giving those people any real value...they aren't blazing trails...they are just providing access. Every time I looked at information on the Web, there were countless choices of hyperlinks that I could follow..maybe twenty choices at once. The choices didn't seem matched to thought processes... they just seemed to be guesses at what people might want to read...and most of the information isn't worth reading anyway.

Follow Trail: How Trailblazers Might Follow the Example of the Memex >