(2019-08-29) Constantin How To Make A Memex

Sarah Constantin: How to Make A Memex. Arguably the Internet forms one big memex today. But Vannevar Bush imagined the memex as a private (though shareable) record, not a communal one. Each person should have their own memex. This matters because people need complex private thought.

Nicholas Carr, concerned about the effect of the Internet on human cognition, argues that a "complex personality" is actually the result of forming one's own interpretations of what one reads, forming a private "cathedral-like" structure, a "personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West."

Educated men and women of the 19th century worked at constructing inner lives through text. They kept diaries. They wrote letters. They kept files so they could remember what they were writing at different points in their lives. (Commonplace Book)

Social media has a short memory. The defaults don't permit you to organize your own space.

Moreover, the demands of immediate sharing... Not only are you incentivized away from writing controversial things, but also of writing anything that might be confusing or involve a large inferential distance from the audience. Long and nested chains of reasoning are hard to convey to all readers.

The solution is to create a personal memex. A record of your thoughts and associations, which you will only share parts of with others. I use Roam for this. (vs PrivateWiki)

Roam has two main features that make it better than a simple notebook or text document: links and indents

Links, of course, allow you to make associations between pages. Infinitely threaded indents allow you to impose hierarchical structures of arbitrary depth. This allows you to make and visualize a graph of all your notes: (GraphDrawing)

Mainly, I use my memex as a personal record of my thoughts.

When I mention a concept, I tag the word so it links to the corresponding concept page.

I've noticed this allows me to think in a more nuanced way.