Reducing White Noise / Towards a common information garbage policy

Abstract

One of the visions almost excessively quoted in current discussions of what the information infrastructure of the WWW may ultimately turn out to be is Vannevar Bush’s article ”As we may think” written in 1945, and thus quite some time before the advent of computers as we know them today. In fact, Bush’s vision concerns the organization of information much more than the technical means and instruments used for that goal. Bush has often been quoted, because some of the technical ideas developed in that context seem to be excellent guesses at what later architectures for information automation turned out to be and this especially concerns the famous Memex metaphor, prefiguring to some extent some of the basic technical principles underlying the information architecture of the WWW. Still, the article actually is mainly concerned with the organization of information, with modes of accumulation, aggregation and selection of information.