Making a distinction.

While working on this column, I jotted most of the following onto a piece of scratch paper:

Just a moment ago I copied a short blogpost from one of the blogs I try to follow, and pasted it into my gmail, saving it as a "draft". And I'm still scratching my head, asking myself just why I did such a thing. After all, considering that I do most of my blog reading via Bloglines, there would have been no problem simply checking it in order to keep it "new", and I'd encounter it whenever I visit that blog via Bloglines.

Later, I typed that scribbled note into digital format, and continued to add to it:

There are undoubtedly a number of reasons, but it seems to me that a central one of these is related to what I've written in the past about bookmarks - basically, it's not that we need the bookmark, it's that we need to create some sort of pause of consideration that helps us relate to the information we've encountered, that makes it into something that demands our reflection, of thinking with my fingers. In this particular case, just clicking on "keep new" apparently wouldn't have done that for me - I had to move it somewhere else.

This scribbled addition continued, with two bracketed additions. The fact that they were in brackets tells me that these particular thoughts were intended as links.

But these pencil on paper notes, after being added to word-processed notes, became part of a series of thoughts on this subject that have to stand or fall on their content, rather than on the method by which they were jotted down. In addition, once this material had become part of my notes, I was free to play around with them, edit them, delete them, or expand on them. I continued, for instance, to examine the reaons for using, or not using, different tools or formats, listing, at least, one additional reason.

The decisions about where I save something, in what format, on what drive or server, can, and often does, have meaning for me. Certain items fit particular tools. At other times, however, the how and where are much less important that the simple fact that I'm saving something. It's not exactly that we want to save something (perhaps we want to save something only long enough to show it to someone else) but that we want to take note of it. We have to do something in order to stop the flow of information, we have to keep that "something" from blending into an indistinguishable mass of information. The act of saving is an act of distinguishing, of drawing a line, of singling out some thing as being separate, different from others.

Go to: Doing things the hard way.