REFLECTION

After reading Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Tim Berners Lee's "Long Live the Web", I feel that the most interesting part about these two essays is that the views on emerging technologies, especially on the web, written by two authors who are from entirely different tech eras, are able to cover the various attitudes that people should hold when viewing these new inventions comprehensively.

Bush makes a very thorough and complete analysis of the prediction of the development trend of science and technology and the impact of these new technologies in 1945. The "Memex" he mentioned in the second half of the article basically explains most of the functions of computers and networks that will appear later. What is surprising is not only his imaginations of the technology itself, but also Bush's predictions of many of the impacts and changes it might bring.

In Lee's article, based on his observation of reality and people's current understanding of web related technologies, he analyzed its impact and predicted the future development trend. If Bush is looking back at the camera and other technologies to look forward to the changes brought about by the emergence of a new technology, Lee is looking back at how the emergence of computers and the web has brought positive and negative effects, and puts forward some suggesting attitudes towards these developments. I found it really inspring to read these two essays by two authors that viewed the same inventions from different stages of their emergence.