Vannevar Bush and the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole (assignment 1, part 2)

In a 1945 essay titled "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush showed that he was truly a forward-thinking man of his time, extrapolating from already-existing technologies back then to what the future might hold. He came shockingly close to predicting the kinds of technologies we have now, and I'd like to touch on one of them in particular that stood out to me. Bush writes:

"Thus far we seem to be worse off than before--for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. [...] There may be millions of fine thoughts [...] all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."

When I was a child, the internet was not yet a thing. It was about to be: by the mid-1990s, suddenly everyone knew this was a Thing worth paying attention to, and by the late '90s some people had started to have computers in their own homes (!) that could even connect to the internet (!!) (which was, of course, back then, a very rudimentary version of what we have now). Nowadays, if you're writing a research paper, you consult the internet for information, for sources, even for where to find relevant books. But before any of this, what we had was encyclopedias. I remember that my parents had bought a set of encyclopedias at some point, I think from an estate sale, so that by the time we got them they were already some years out of date. But even so, this was luxury back then. When I needed to research something for a school assignment, I didn't always have to go to the library; sometimes I could just consult our very own encyclopedia set. (I think it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica, and I remember it being very big and fancy, though that could just be nostalgia talking.) Anyway: despite this relative luxury, researching things took time. Often our outdated set didn't have what I was looking for, and I'd need to beg my parents to take me to the library, where I'd then have to find the book(s) I needed and start all over. (And often even that wasn't foolproof; a book might have only one paragraph on the subject you needed, and you'd have to consult 10 more books just to find what you were looking for.)

I remember, too, when Wikipedia first started. Nobody took it seriously: my teachers stressed that we could not use it as a reliable source of information, we certainly couldn't cite it for papers, and everyone just generally thought it was going to go away eventually. Well, look at us now! 2019 and Wikipedia is going strong -- not only that, it's a reliable source of information for people all over the planet. We can access it within moments to find out what we're looking for, to read about the topic, and to find links to what my teachers would have called more reliable sources (e.g., news articles, books, etc.).

This photo is literally titled "Wikipedia Rabbit Hole"

Bush talks, too, about what we now call the "Wikipedia rabbit hole" -- you know what I'm talking about: you look up one thing, which has a link to something else, which links to something else, and suddenly all you were trying to find out was how big an alligator is and it's 5 hours later and you've found yourself reading an article about how the tides work and how the moon affects them and what the tides on Jupiter might be like. Bush writes:

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. [...] When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants."

Yup. Wikipedia rabbit hole right there.