Citation (65)
The actual context within with the actual user is really seeking something is not capable, moreover, of classification. Granted, such an index is objective and attains the full objectivity of the given text. Granted, every selective index signifies a subjective interpretation of the text. Granted, this is deplored by every individual user as a defect. For that reason, the users will find useful not the ‘perfected’ index but only the index which corresponds with their own subjective points of view. And that is the one which they compile themselves. Only such an index is so selected that it potentially ‘reminds’ in all its data. It ‘reminds’ as the presentation given by the context index of the machine is unable to do. This is because the latter does not rediscover in itself individual memory traces but necessarily offers everything that it ‘knows’. Whether this is helpful to the users in presenting, for example, new observations to them is the question. There will be such cases. But there will also be the opposite, where one is looking something up while one should be reading.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer (‘Theory, Technology, Praxis’,
in The Enigma of Health, trans. J. Gaiger & N. Walker, p. 27)