The History of Paper as a History of Personal Information Management - DBR 068

This episode is about the history of personal information management as viewed through a now ancient technology, PAPER

 

We’ll have a couple of takeaways:

 

One is human beings have been trying to manage their own personal information for a long time, so we don’t need to be so worried about the current need – we’re humans so we manage information.

 

We’ll glean wisdom from these previous efforts to manage the information that the world presents to us.

 

We’ll assess tactics and mindsets that are going to be useful to us.

 

Hat tip to the Art of Manliness website, and to Roland Allen talking about his book, The Notebook. There's also information in this podcast from a book called Hamlet's BlackBerry that I read some years ago, and a book called The information that that talks about the history of our understanding of information and its use in our world, so some combination of those things.

 

The management of personal information 

 

Ancient: Plato was skeptical of writing as an information management technique.

 

Less ancient: people used wax tablets.

• In the 1300s we were using money. We had language; we had poetry; we heard things that we wanted to record and wanted to tell other people. And so, life was not a ton simpler than it is now.
• Note on reusable media.

Even less, but still fairly, ancient: the commercial availability of paper

• Note: we had blank paper for hundreds of years before we had the printing press.
• People would get a bound collection of paper called a notebook. Also hundreds of years before printing.
• Gave rise to various practices in information keeping, information management.

Non-printed Books

• Initially, books were handwritten and hand copied
• Note on the reliability measures of Old Testament copying
• Making a hand-copy of a book while sitting at a desk for extended periods of time being read to and writing this down.
• A bound set of pieces of paper that you write in would not have been foreign
• The commonplace book

Printed books

• The notion of an almanac
• Printing created a more authoritative position for authors and publishers, along with a broader reach

Education

• Use of notebooks in education – what can we learn
• Diaries and travelogues would have been more autobiographical
• The notion of a textbook really dates from the 1800s or so
• The notion that education could very likely have been the creation of books f