I know I'm not the only guy carrying around a Moleskine (with stickers, even) and a pen in his pocket, but I have been asked a few times why I have one of those and not some super slick digital device. I'd like to have a better smartphone, but I've found no real substitute for a good pocket journal and a decent pen. In fact, I value this little journal so much that I've hacked it a bit to ditch my wallet, so as to reduce the stuff in my pockets.
Danah Boyd muses over how her handwriting has devolved. She writes, "My patience for creating text at a rate slower than I think has decayed."
For me, though, my handwriting remains as vital as ever — and I have a notion that there's some value in slowing down my thinking at times. Slow enough, that is, to match the speed of my memory and deeper levels of consideration. Engaging my motor skills and proprioception in the act of writing seems like a powerful thing to me in the facilitation of serious thought.
I had a teacher in high school who gave 3 or 4 big exams a year. They were brutal, demanding things. The one concession he gave was a single sheet of off-white paper to each of us, on which we could write anything and bring to the exam. It became a regular ritual to spend a late night scrawling everything covered in the past months in cramped handwriting, filling up both sides of the sheet. (This is the period during which I first fell in love with Pilot Precise V5 pens.)
With the advent of inkjet and laser printers in the home, some smart-asses just prepared a Word doc in 8 point type and fed the sheet through the machine. More likely than not, though, the kids who handwrote everything tended to pass with flying colors — while those who took shortcuts never did as well. This is something that's stuck with me very persistently.
Something this brings to mind is the Skoderider species from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep: The Skoderiders are plant-based sentient life who were gifted sometime in the distant past with what amount to combination Segway/Super-PDAs that give them both mobility and intelligence augmentation.
The riders' natural minds require a great deal of repetition and concentration to impress permanent memories by literally growing the structures. To address this, the skodes they ride provide a more fluid and flexible form of technology-based memory to the riders' otherwise ephemeral immediate consciousness.
I think the difference between me and a skoderider is really just a matter of degree. It's easier for me to imprint permanent memories in my natural mind, but the process is still orders of magnitude slower than offloading my thoughts into a computer. However, there are some benefits in representation, metaphor, indexing, and retrieval in my natural mind that computers have yet to match.
Thus, keeping things in my head still has some great value — and the process of using handwritten journal contributes greatly to that, I think. It externalizes my thoughts while still reinforcing their patterns through the greater immersion of the act.
So, to explain the title for this entry: A moleskine and a pen are information technology — insofar as they're human-made artifacts useful in the processing of information and the augmentation of intelligence. It's easy to forget that, being that they're so primitive and lacking in blinkenlights or batteries. But, nonetheless, I find them very useful for expanding my head.