Abstract

Abstract The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2020-09-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0495
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References (65) · 2 in this index

  1. 1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/0…
  2. 2. In 1945, Life Magazine had a readership of 4 million and the Atlantic had a readership of 131,000. The Atl…
  3. 3. More specifically, Ivan Sutherland (who wrote Sketchpad, the first computer graphics software), Ted Nelson…
  4. 4. van Dam’s presentation was part of a conference titled “A Celebration of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Vision, an E…
  5. 5. Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: App…
Show all 65 →
  1. 6. Ned O'Gorman, "Aristotle's Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Di…
  2. Advances in the History of Rhetoric
  3. 7. Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (New York: William Morrow, 1970), 190
  4. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex," in From Memex to Hypertext: Van…
  5. 8. For an overview of rhetoric and post-humanism, see Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, “Introduction: Pushing…
  6. 9. Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
  7. 10. This argument parallels David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler’s arguments that rhetoric should itself be co…
  8. 11. A few exemplary studies of technology in process include Lucy A. Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations:…
  9. 12. Julie A. Cohn, The Grid: Biography of an American Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Peter Gali…
  10. 13. These scholars have also challenged the field’s focus on material technologies, emphasizing the value of …
  11. 14. The Memex and “As We May Think” appear in many histories of computing. For example, Garfinkel and Grunspa…
  12. 15. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, eds., From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine (Boston,…
  13. Michael K. Buckland, "Emanuel Goldbert, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex," Journal of…
  14. 16. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Chicago, …
  15. 17. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Linda C. Smi…
  16. 18. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of…
  17. 19. Bush’s biographer characterizes the Memex essay as one chapter in the “grand tradition of the art of memo…
  18. 20. Richard Yeo, “Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush on External Memory,” Science in C…
  19. 21. Vannevar Bush, “Mechanical Solutions of Engineering Problems,” Tech Engineering News 9 (1928):ix.
  20. 22. This quote comes from The New Freedom, which was a collection of speeches and writings from Wilson’s 1912…
  21. 23. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 138.…
  22. 24. For an extended discussion of these trends, see William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The …
  23. 25. As John M. Jordan writes, technocrats have been labeled, variously, “technocratic progressives, technocra…
  24. 26. Davis W. Houck, Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression (College Station: Texas…
  25. 27. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, 234.
  26. 28. Quoted in Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, 240.
  27. 29. Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Compan…
  28. 30. Lippmann, Good Society, 29. This epistemological limitation, the fundamentally “partial views” of the hum…
  29. 31. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 63-67.
  30. 32. Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate Over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-194…
  31. 33. Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement…
  32. 34. Nell Irving Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987),…
  33. 35. Robert Lynd’s 1939 book, titled Knowledge for What? was an outright public challenge to the social scienc…
  34. 36. Gary, Nervous Liberals, 25.
  35. 37. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 109. Quoted in Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public …
  36. 38. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 64.
  37. 39. Herbert Hoover, Principles of Mining (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1909), 402. Vannevar Bush…
  38. 40. Bush, “The Engineer and His Relation to Government,” speech given at the American Institute of Electrical…
  39. 41. Bush, “The Engineer and His Relation to Government,” 932.
  40. 42. Bush, “The Engineer and His Relation to Government,” 930.
  41. 43. Lippmann, Good Society, 363; Bush, “The Engineer and His Relation to Government,” 929.
  42. 44. Throughout the analysis, I will refer to quotations from the Atlantic Monthly version of the essay, which…
  43. 45. Vannevar Bush, “Mechanical Solutions,” ix.
  44. 46. Throughout the analysis, I will refer to the user of the Memex using masculine pronouns. This is intended…
  45. 47. Bush is also anticipating mid-twentieth-century arguments about the personal and social nature of scienti…
  46. 48. Paul Kahn claimed in 1995 that Crimi drew these illustrations from a single reading of “As We May Think.”…
  47. 49. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 63, 72.
  48. 50. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. W. Kluba…
  49. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  50. 52. Ronald E. Day, Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (Cambridge…
  51. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary on Hugh's Didascalion (Chicago, IL: University of Chic…
  52. 53. Bush is quite vague in “As We May Think” about the technical mechanism for achieving this. However, durin…
  53. 54. The landscape metaphors abound: this type of reading is what we tend to call surveying the literature.
  54. 55. This is why scholars of technology have focused on how humans and technologies create cultures and practi…
  55. 56. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psyched…
  56. 57. Vannevar Bush to Eric Hodgins, “‘Memorandum Regarding Memex,‘ 10 April 1941,” in From Memex to Hypertext, 83.
  57. 58. Douglas Engelbart interview by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood, December 19, 1986 in Stanford, CA. Transcript…
  58. 59. John Markoff, What the Dormhouse Said, 6-7. Engelbart wrote to Bush in 1962 asking for permission to exce…
  59. 60. Rosemary Simpson, Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and Andries van Dam, “50 Years After ‘As We May Think’: The…
  60. 61. Erik Kluitenberg, “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” 48.