Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for.

Compared with other kinds of digital output, a screenshot feels “homemade” — a piece of digital DIY confirming that screen spaces contain as much mundaneness as the “analog” or “offline” world. In a time when so much communication and production is mediated by a set of increasingly powerful corporate platforms and absorbed into the internet’s big c... See more