the memex twists

I’m watching the Scrybe overview video especially the part about pulling clippings from the web. The demo user is grabbing a variety of content and putting it on a new web page in her own space. Here’s an important difference between Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex and what the web has become. We’re still not as interested in paths through information as Bush (or even Doug Engelbart) assumed we would become. But we are aggregating content on our own sites, on pages of our own design. We are actively remediating this data under our own mastheads. We are taking ownership, defining out own part of cyberspace, making our own flows connections and tensions, remediating the media according to our wills.

These representations are jealous of their host. Like mockingbirds, they force out the legitimate children of their hosts and destroy. As many people have pointed out, the memory and the representation cannot seem to share the same location in memory. This model of the mind parallels the Wunderkabinett (or Wunderkammer depending on whether you experience your mind as furniture or architecture) where memories are like mittens stuffed into cubbies so small they may hold only a single pair (or a photograph of those mittens or a text describing the same mittens. The obvious addition to this model is to add another dimension, another layer perhaps that shares some dimensions with the original object. These dimensions may be locative (think geographic information systems), set-based (think database queries), social, aesthetic, etc. etc.

So what about Bush’s pathways? Are they doomed to a sorry existence in your browser history menu??