Ted Nelson, a pioneer of information technology, is best known as the "father of Hypertext". He was one of people inspired by Vannevar Bush. Bush introduces a new technical macine called "memex" in his essay "As We May Think". Later, Nelson created similar macine named "Hypertext"which was to enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations based on Bush's hypothetical.
Nelson also created CosmicBook which shows visiable links go over windows in 2004. Basically, all information are not visiable and concluded within a windows, so cosmicbook was unusual program.
Almost of all information in the internet are linked each other. If every link become vidiable, how many links could we find on a computar's screen? It is no doubt that it will be inpossible to count them but interesting to know how things are related with the visiable links.
Facebook is the one of most famous SNS in the world, and quite many people have their own facebook across countries. On the facebook, you can find your friends without searching friends yourself because facebook suggests people who might know you based on mutual friends, school, activities and social communities. It will be interesting and much easier to know the connections by using CosmicBook through the visiable links. Meanwhile, it scares me because people finally might lose their privacy. In addition, SNS including facebook has become a tool for many kinds of actions for terrorisms. So now, it is time to discuss how to develop and use high technologies in our lives.
Thank you for a comment on my blog. Comparison of how the links on the Internet are visualized on Ted Nelson's CosmicBook and facebook is quite interesting. I didn't know about the CosmicBook. Good blog.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the informative blog post. It would be interesting to see if anyone could download the Cosmic Book software and make it work. The link you gave has the program available for download but it is Windows only and I use a Mac.
ReplyDeleteAnother student in our class tried to install and use Nelson's other program: Xanadu. He said the program was kind of rough and need some work. I imagine the CosmicBook experience would be about the same.