
Paul Otlet Envisioned the Internet Before Computers, Without Computers (2014) - dredmorbius
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae37mb/the-man-who-envisioned-the-internet-before-computers-without-computers
======
LyndsySimon
> It's a new way of seeing the internet, in one of its best lights—a
> standardized compendium of human knowledge that can be accessed from
> wherever you are. From this vantage the trolls, the frivolity of listicles
> fade away, and it seems like a triumph.

This is very much how I see it.

I’m sitting in a hospital room with a family member recovering from a minor
surgery, browsing HN and other topics of interest. For literally anything that
comes to mind I can access more material than I could read in a lifetime, from
an iPad. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, and I’m thankful for it.

~~~
bamboozled
"I can access more material than I could read in a lifetime, from an iPad.
It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, and I’m thankful for it."

I too am thankful for it. Although, I see this as a blessing and a curse.

It's now so hard to stay focused on anything specific, so time consuming to
wade through all the useful and non-useful information, so full of
distractions and misinformation. If you know where to look it's wonderful, but
I feel the same a way about good books, magazine or blog.

When I was a kid, I remember my grandmother had The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It was wonderfully simple and enjoyable to read through. Every page felt
interesting and exciting.

I don't really get this feeling from anything online.

The Internet is wonderful, I wish people respected it more.

~~~
dredmorbius
That problem, and the problem of finding quality information, is precisely
what's driven multiple information rationalisers.

It's a sentiment I first had on entering my uni library and its 3 million or
so volumes, recognising I'd never be able to access more than a tiny fraction
of them. The limits of human information processing are formidable.

Mortimer Adler's _How to Read a Book_ inspires me, perhaps, to try to attempt
"How to Read 10,000 books", that being a sustained rate of 150 books a year
over about 65 years, or one every two days or so. The answer would have to
involve _not reading much of them_ , as well as other techniques.

You can find the sentiments in Ecclesiastes ("Much study is a weariness of the
flesh, and of the making of books there is no end."), Seneca, Diderot (his
commentary on information overload is a classic), Schopenhauer, and many more.

The notion that a better bibliographic control can solve the problem is a
compelling and attractive one, but also ... at odds with actual experience.
It's a possiblity I'm pursuing myself (how I happened to come across Otlet),
though the problems he encountered, of creating, maintaining, sustaining, and
_using_ the index, seem formidable.

With the rise of the World Wide Web and search engines, the approach has
generally been toward full-text search combined with a measure of reputational
assessment, rather than topical or semantic assessment, though multiple
(mostly abortive) attempts at a semantic Web have been made.

My thought is that a hybrid approach combining elements, but not obsessing
over the purity of any one method, might be an improvement.

------
WalterBright
The first internet was the telegraphy network, in fact, much foundational
computer technology came from telegraphy.

"The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage

~~~
waste_monk
I wonder what telegraph era memes and shitposting looked like.

~~~
Rerarom
Terry Pratchett's _Going Postal_ has a bit of that.

------
8bitsrule
The website of the 'Mundaneum' Belgium museum is here:
[http://www.mundaneum.org/en](http://www.mundaneum.org/en)

(Alas the pop-up message seems to be in French only. Is it a plea?)

~~~
WaitWaitWha
The pop-up basically says that there is limited heat in the museum and will
reopen 2020-01-15. Because of inconvenience, they will give free access to the
exhibitions and some coffee at the end of the exhibit visit. They also
extending the visit to one of the exhibits.

------
pmoriarty
So did E. M. Forster[1], who in 1909 published _The Machine Stops_.[2]

In it, Forster predicted something like a proto-Internet, chat rooms, video
conferencing, and internet addiction.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster)

[2] - [https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-
Machi...](https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-
Stops.pdf)

~~~
Causality1
Also Tesla if I recall correctly.

------
givepause
Imagine a species having the capacity to share every bit of its knowledge,
with every one of its people, and choosing not to do so.

Calling all PHP, SQL, Elastic Search, distributed computing experts, and
everyone else with the drive to share knowledge. Sign up to change that, here.

~~~
rambojazz
Sign where?

------
dredmorbius
What interest me at the moment are contemporary views of Otlet's philosophy of
cataloguing and classification.

His Universal Decimal Classification still exists, and has a common lineage
with Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification.

Otlet's notion of comprehensive bibliographic metadata seems somewhat passe,
with modern focus on full-text-search and reputational ranking.

