From 2015, it's depressing that the sea change he felt didn't materialize. This is a very good exposition of what Vannevar Bush was actually describing and how wrongly we've interpreted it. The comparison to junk food for our current model is apt and oft repeated. I feel it right now, the empty sugar rush of writing a comment and hoping for a reply or the drama of the up and down votes when I know I should be linking this article in to a personal datastore and expanding on the interesting parts and dissecting the clumsy ones but I don't have one that's easy to use and hard to lose. Let alone a highly polished one that incorporates the social reinforcement of seeing what others are building and getting feedback on my own work. I guess I'll just bookmark it and forget about it.
It’s funny you say this, because I see this article linked all the time - and it’s had a major influence in my circles. (Public wiki and Indieweb culture.)
A lot of the buzz around Roam Research also plays into this, with many people suddenly tossing around the phrases Zettelkasten, commonplace books, mind palaces, personal knowledge bases and garden wikis. (You can even search HN for these terms and find regular discussion here about that. See also: Obsidian from this week.)
If you want me to put together a longer directory of links I can. Or maybe you’re happy to just bookmark it and forget about it - I get that too.
That's great that there is still an underground culture around this concept but my gripe is that it's been 5 years and we still haven't built anything usable. I think it's the same gripe the author has but his was that it had been 70 years and we still weren't there yet. We were on track at one point but right now we seem to be deeply lost in the weeds with no clear way out.
The stream is like oral culture, where expressions exist in temporal sequence and referring to connections often requires indirectly shared context; the garden is like a literate culture, where expressions can directly as well as indirectly link?
Both are fun and useful; I tend to gravitate to the literate side (coincidence: "garden" and "culture" both have agricultural roots) because direct linking makes it easy to discover new garden paths, whereas the oral side requires a much deeper commitment to learning a culture to catch the references streaming past.
While it isn't quite the Federated Wiki that the author describes, I've been enjoying using are.na to curate my readings and areas of interest.
When I post a link to a channel (as they call it), such as this article, it shows me other public channels that contain the same link, which I can then include or explore for related links, or even contribute to.
As an excellent example I've now found many related readings to this article that aren't directly about the same topic but are close enough to have been curated into the same set by some users.
