As We May Think

It is clear upon read Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think that he was a visionary with great expectations for the future that was lying ahead of him. Almost all of the ideas he expressed in his paper have come to pass in various forms, except for his final and most important idea regarding information association and storage techniques. Bush argues that we will have a system for storing experience, research, and all other kinds of information in an associated web that ties all of itself together and is easily recognized and navigated. It may seem that the ability to do this has been created, but not the spirit of it. If one has a in their possession a smart phone and access to a computer, it would be feasible to store all the knowledge that you retain in your life in a a single searchable repository. Unfortunately, nobody does this. The average person skims through data quickly with no thought of indexing what they have learned and associating it with other things that they have learned. In some ways the world wide web is working in this way, by indexing all knowledge and making it easily searchable. This is not the same thing though, as a lions share of the information available on the web will never be pertinent to the topic at hand.
Bush proposes a sort of personalized Google that indexes all of a person's intellectual experiences. Parallels can also be drawn with FaceBook, if you replace the idea of an intellectual experience with that of a person's social experience.
In many ways Bush would be proud of how the storage of information has improved and how much more accessible it is now than it was following World War 2, but in other ways he would be disturbed. He stated that the amount of information available is a fundamental problem that encourages and necessitates specialization in individuals. While this advances the human race as a whole, it limits the learning of individuals by preventing the free flowing exchange of contextual kowledge.
I wonder if Bush would agree or disagree with Robert Heinlein?
   
         A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein