why do we write stuff into our notebooks?

Writing isn’t just how I communicate ideas or discoveries; it’s how I come up with them in the first place.

Understood this way, “common sense” might better be called a “communal sense” to distinguish it from what usually comes to mind when most of us hear the phrase. Under these conditions, to know is to share a world. A world in this case is more than just the things out there. It is a community of interpretation.

1. Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.


2. Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.


3. What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of

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What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?

And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.