Networked Media - Week 1

24 May 2017
documentationcoursesnetworked-media

In "As We May Think," Vannever Bush describes Memex as a device that will store the world's knowledge in a networked way. It foreshadows the internet in a surprising way, such as predicting the feature of hyperlinking, and particularly in foreseeing the large scale potential of projects such as Wikipedia.

One feature that is overlooked in the piece is the complexity of human knowledge. There is an inherent tension is in the messiness of human activity writ large and representing that in computational form, which at its essence, must be reduced to binary form - 1 or 0, true or false. While of course there are many ways to address these limitations computationally, one can also see strains of the techno-utopianism that are playing out in Silicon Valley culture today and producing all sorts of harmful side effects.

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The other part of the assignment was to use node to create a work of hypertext art, fiction, or poetry. Here's mine.

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