McLuhan --> Broken Links --> Associative Indexing

Something that has been on my mind for a little while now and has consequently passed its class discussion expiration date. . . McLuhan makes a big deal out of the idea that media provide us with extensions of ourselves, but what if the medium is unreliable? I'm concerned only about the mechanics of the medium, not about the misrepresentation of any "real" world. I mean what happens when you reach for something and it's just not there? Objects in the physical world rarely surprise us with their sudden absence; very few things seem to be there but aren't. We don't tolerate books with missing pages, or television signals that spontaneously drop segments from shows. But the internet, which we imagine will one day encompass all content everywhere, is full of dead links, of pages that don't turn. How many times has class in ITS been momentarily derailed by a misdirected browser? And thanks to our sexy embedded hyperlinks, even search engines can't help locate the truant content of the blogosphere.

In class we seemed generally jazzed about what Vannevar Bush calls "associative indexing" (as opposed to alphanumeric indexing). He attributes the associative method to the human brain and suggests that mechanization could improve some of its aspects: "it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage." The blogosphere seems to offer us a model of associative indexing that at the very least has long way to go in terms of "permanence." ("Clarity" is also not an idea that I would readily associate with blogs, especially those full of broken-link holes, but Bush probably means that items will be recalled in the same condition they were stored... Which I guess is not necessarily the case with blogs or the content to which they link....)

It is not only the flawed associative index (or its unreliable medium) that I have questions about. Is there a way in which the fixing of associations threatens the currency of the associated items? Is that kind of index anything more than a calcification of thought? Or is associative indexing the manufacture of (to keep with the chem metaphors) compounds of thought, which may then be deployed to new effect? If that's the case, then this blog thing is at least making an attempt to follow in the perfectly smooth, perfectly round footsteps of writing, by offering us mediated consolidation as a springboard to ever more abstract thought.