Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” on information overload, curation, and open-access science.

Tim O’Reilly recently admonished that unless we embrace open access over copyright, we’ll never get science policy right. The sentiment, which I believe applies to more than science, reminded me of an eloquent 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush, then-director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, titled 'As We May Think.' As the war, with its exploitation of science and technology, draws to a close, Bush turns a partly concerned, partly hopeful eye to where scientists will rediscover 'objectives worthy of their best' and calls for 'a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.'  Much of what Bush discusses presages present conversations about information overload, filtering, and our restless 'FOMO'—fear of missing out... Bush worries about the impossibility of ever completely catching up and the unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio: 'Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.'  More than half a century before blogging, Instagramming, tweeting, and the rest of today’s ever-lowering barriers of entry for publishing content, Bush laments the unmanageable scale of the recorded 'human experience':  'The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record...' Marveling at the rapid rate of technological progress, which has made possible the increasingly cheap production of increasingly reliable machines, Bush makes an enormously important—and timely—point about the difference between merely compressing information to store it efficiently and actually making use of it in the way of gleaning knowledge. (This, bear in mind, despite the fact that 90 percent of data in the world today was created in the last two years.) ... "