I found this very interesting Fast Company article today which talks about an experiment called MyLifeBits that Gordon Bell has been running for some time at the Microsoft Research Labs.
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is
the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and
hyperlinks.
Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of
articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos,
pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is
beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Roosevelt, published a ground-breaking article in Atlantic Monthly in 1945 called As We May Think which introduced the world to the Memex. He was seeking a solution to the problem that still faces many individuals and companies today: how to manage all the information that is potentially available to us. His seminal article is still well worth a read today to anyone interested in learning, knowledge industries, psychology, blogging or the internet.
From Bush's article in 1945:
"The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, [but] the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."
Bush wrote of the memex being "a conceptual machine that could store vast amounts of information, in which a user had the ability to create information "trails": links of related text and illustrations". This trail could then be stored and used for future reference. Bush believed that using this associative method of information gathering was not only practical in its own right, but was closer to the way the mind ordered information. Well, due to the increased capability of technology today, we are of course close to achieving this vision. As per Gordon Bell's experiment, we will soon be able to theoretically capture, store and retrieve everything that has happened to us in our lives.
The implications of this explosion in data capture and storage have been widely explored. The most significant change would of course be that we would have, at our fingertips, everything we have ever experienced. If we can retrieve this information efficiently we would therefore be much more knowledgeable. Rather than relying on what we can remember we will be able to seek out knowledge from our memex as long as we can remember what to search for. Bush saw this as empowering many professional decision-making processes, for example:
"The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior. The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch."
Bush also saw that the memex could be a tool for learning and making connections:
"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 encyclopaedia, 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. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. 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. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."
Intriguingly, Bush also suggests the growth of a certain type of knowledge worker, those that make connections for others. We might consider these people to be Memex-builders, those who create a "knowledge trail" for the rest of us to follow. Bush calls them trail blazers:
"There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find
delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous
mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not
only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the
entire scaffolding by which they were erected."
The Memex concept is fascinating. Whilst I was unaware of Bush's work at the time, my ambitions for this blog were in some ways similar to the memex concept: I wanted
this blog to become a repository for all the things I found of interest.
The key difference between Bell's MyLifeBits or Christian Lindholm's
LifeBlog concept and this blog, however, is that I have had to be very selective.
Where they have both tried to record every aspect of their lives, I have selected only a few of the things I have read, experienced or thought about partly because I felt it would be unmanageable to post too much. I wonder if that will change as time goes on?
I can't get my head around what some people are capable of achieving in one lifetime. 
