Thought Shrapnel

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the place where a famous artist, or musician, or writer was born/worked/died? Although it might be interesting on a surface level, the likelihood is that whoever it was escaped their environment into a world of imagination.

Less tedious to look at are artefacts such as notes, scribbled ideas and marginalia. What happens to all this, though, with a purely digital workflow? What will future historians have to work with? I’m guessing famous writers are similar to me: I don’t write letters to my wife, I sent her messages on Signal; I don’t scribble down ideas on scraps of paper, I make digital notes; I don’t scribble in books; I highlight sections on Kindle or Google Books.

More importantly—for a biographer or anyone trying to tell a good story—the digital version of a hastily scribbled note pinned to the apartment door is less tangible and thus harder to romanticize. Text messages still don’t evoke adventure, even if they are the invisible engine behind most of what happens. They inherently violate the “show don’t tell” rule; they are all telling and no showing. […]

Analog media may not convey information as efficiently, but it has other benefits that may be easier to appreciate in hindsight. It is more decorative. It furnishes the physical environment in a way that digital technology—always evolving toward smaller, smoother, and lighter—does not. Or to put it another way: When digital technology is visible it’s usually because it failed to be invisible. The exception to this is the ever-present screen, which remains visible by definition, obviously; screens now account for nearly all of a computer’s tangible presence in the world. And screens are the exception that prove the rule because, as Byung-Chul Han has noted, we look through them rather than at them. Screens don’t decorate the physical environment so much as they invite us to stare through a window into a different kind of non-place.

Source: Kneeling Bus