Vannevar Bush: paranoid kook or brilliant visionary?

Reading As We May Think for class really tickled my librarian sensibilities (memex, anyone?), but also made me consider the combination of skepticism and hope that comes with the prediction of new technologies and their impact on culture and society. While skepticism can limit the potential of new ideas and new ways of thinking, it is a key ingredient to questioning and curiousity in times of uncertainty. As long as it we do not allow it to squash innovation and invention, skepticism can be an ideal companion to hope. 

Dr. Bonk says "Plato was the first distance educator" for his use of writing and books in his teaching. I can imagine that there were many doomsayers of these technologies in Plato's day, as well, in addition to people who were skeptical of the printing press and other such wonders. What's interesting to me is that there are many people who predict the bad things, but not so many that are willing to consider the good that can come from these new ways of seeing/thinking/doing/knowing. 

That's why I was so happy to see another Atlantic article on our readingwhich  list: Is Google Making us Stupid? which discusses the almost blind adoption of the web as our primary means for communicating knowledge and information. The article makes us review the decline of our readerly selves who once indulged in long periods of learning, imagining, and enjoying through the written word into a society of info addicts feeding on the glut of online data through bites that we either self-select or that are fed to us without much conscious choice on our part. Although it is true we are reading fewer books each year, we are adapting to an information environment in which knowledge can be communicated and retrieved quickly and easily. This means we are more agile in our own thinking and reading. This flexibility brought about by new technologies can definitely be considered a good thing, unless we let it change the way we think and read permanently. 

We're still in a time of uncertainty. This, along with the importance of engaging/questioning the skeptics, is what I wanted to illustrate with the video I showed in class on 9/8/08: Epic 2014. It seems to me like these two articles from the Atlantic, one published in 1945 and the other in 2008, are excellent bookends for the video. I think all three pieces can help us come to terms with the way we predict the possibilities and question the potential of technology, especially its impact on the publication and dissemination of knowledge and information.