Looking back at Vannevar Bush’s original essay As We May Think, we read about a device called the memex. The memex was a networked tool for thought, that allowed humans to fork, comment, remix and generate new ideas from old ones. Many technologists today, imagine that to be the way the web enables thought today.

An analysis of the web quickly dispels the fantasy. The memex was composed of a rich network of associative links that could be freely copied and edited. Today’s web is a feed- a temporally arranged sequence of content that is flowing past you at all times.

Youtube feeds us the vidoes we might like, and twitter is a 24/7 feed of everything everyone is saying around the world. Associative links are traded for a timeline. To make matters worse, most material on the web is not free to be remixed (Thank God for Github).

Rather than an associative network of links, our digital experience looks like a stream of content. In some ways, that is good. It allows us to stay in touch with the world and it simplifies ideas down to something that can be understood in 250 characters.

The problem is that most of us unconsciously make the tradeoff between the ability to express complex thoughts online and the simplicity offered by social media. By building a web focused around streams, we gain self-expression but lose the ability to think together (web2-is-for-self-expression-not-thought)