When I got to school this morning I decided to stop having a bad attitude when it comes to HIST 390. No more excuses about how my brain doesn’t line up with class discussions. I need to open my brain up to working in different ways and allow myself to ask questions unselfishly. No more “How does this apply to me?” or “That’s not important to me.”.
Today we discussed a lot of stuff. Most of it interesting. I tried not to sit through the whole class just thinking of ways I could pipe up in class, although I still did that, but I think I spent more thinking time on the why. I don’t usually like to ask myself why, it’s such an open ended almost unanswerable question.
Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” article was one of the main topics discussed in class. We also dabbled in Rationalization, sterilization and analog computers. O’Malley showed some videos about analog computers from the 1940’s, military ones. The videos were training videos meant for the Navy. I had a really hard time following the videos, I don’t have an engineer brain, to me they complicated gear based pieces of equipment. I am so glad there are people on this earth who have brains that understand not only how to operate highly complex systems but also how to create them. I find the complexities in these machines to be awe inspiring in much the same way that detailed and realistic paintings are, both are out of reach of my skill levels, which makes them that much more unattainable.
In “As We May Think” Vannevar stressed the need for new ways to store data, mostly for the use of specialists. With Vannevar’s “Memex” and the internet specialists have ways of accessing vast amounts of data, they are able to see not only what pertains to there search but also what things are similar or things that have commonalities with there search. The use of hyperlinks is incredibly helpful when it comes to linking data, . In Carr’s “The Shallows” Carr talks about hyperlinks and how don’t just give us the option to seek other knowledge paths but they propel us off of our original path, into distraction. I am not sure what effect the use of hyperlinks has on the attention span of us regular people, maybe they do lead to distraction. I wonder if Carr would think that the gains in research and for specialists in linking data through hyperlinks makes the sacrifice of the average persons attention span worth it? Does the ability to store data overflow our culture with knowledge? I find that with the internet I can know a little bit about a lot of subjects but it is much harder to restrict myself to one subject, one area.
Pros and cons.
How do I think? Something to think about.