In Vannevar Bush’s essay, “As We May Think”, he discusses his idea for the memex and how it will revolutionize learning for the future. The memex allows a person to access information in a completely different manner than before. Unlike the encyclopedia, you can now access information through multiple places. Bush believes that “They may yet allow him [man] truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience.” (Bush). With his idea, Bush advocates for more information available for the public at a much lower cost. What Bush is advocating for is the freedom of information. We have seen this breakthrough in the past twenty years with websites like wikipedia that use crowd sourcing to give people access to more information. Though the idea of freedom of information seems great in concept, it is a slippery slope. Recently, government information has been shared by people like Edward Snowden believing that he was doing the world a favor by releasing classified government information on wiki leaks. The result of this act was the death of compromised US agents all over the world as well as countless operations that were now compromised. Snowden selfishly posted these documents because he did not recognized the need for authority and was more interested in freeing information that the public did not need access to. Freedom of information is important, but there still must be a respect for authority and a notion that the public does not need access to all information and that privacy is important in society.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/