memex

“Have you tried writing down everything you know about everything?” - xxiivv

adjacent to commonplace books, which are adjacent to journals.

• “Consider a future device, a sort of mechanized private library in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

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Mentions

• Smolicki problematizes the haunting canon of the Memex as fitting new technologies onto its metaphor ‘tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage’ and ‘reproduces[s] the logic of progressivism’ (Smolicki, 2017)
  • “According to Wendy Chun (2008), Memex has become a disproportionally “canonized” model not only for an automated memory supplement, but for digital technology, personal archiving, and the internet in general. Consequently, it has long been contaminating currents of media scholarship in relation to digital computing and memory, both in terms of determining the genealogy of historical media discourse, as well as the development of practical inventions. The perpetual invocation of Memex as a material and conceptual foundation for our contemporary personal computers and digital memory practices not only conserves the progressivist reading of the history of media technologies (by projecting media as continuously transforming toward more seamless, immediate, automated, and invisible aids for the general improvement of our everyday lives), but also tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage.” (Smolicki, 2017)