5 ms·

I think paper probably really does have value for mental retention, but digital is so convenient it's easy to totally forget paper is a thing. Paper is easier

I think paper probably really does have value for mental retention, but digital is so convenient it's easy to totally forget paper is a thing. Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment. The medium shapes your thinking, and the stuff that's hard to do on paper doesn't really occur to you as something you'd want to do, unless you're deeply familiar with it. Just like any technology. Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.

tivert 3y ago
> Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment. In other words, people can be fine with worse because they don't know better. One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023). > Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking. One of the strengths of paper is its flexibility: you can make pretty much any mark you want, not just marks approved and implemented by some 3rd party. You seem to be describing a situation where technical limitations (of digital systems) are so ingrained in people's thought processes that they have trouble thinking outside the little box they've been given.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Years ago I said something along these lines to the CTO of Novell and didn’t get a very satisfactory response. I do think shared collaborative documents have filled a bigger void than many expected. But I still feel the current situation is unsatisfactory.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  I think you pretty much have it spot on. Digital is the like another dialect of language that people think in. The paradigm is "I can very, very, easily make this set of marks, and I'm gonna build my process around them" rather than "I can make any mark I want and I'll spend the time to figure out exactly what marks and what process to use". It's incredibly easy and convenient, since it's all a prepackaged process with really only one medium, linear text, that only needs a tiny fraction of the skill... but we probably are losing something in the process. I never got into paper or handwriting, and gave up on drawing pretty quick after discovering how much harder it is than I expected, so I never really felt anything missing from paper when moving to digital, but thinking more about it, I definitely do think the tech shapes my thoughts pretty heavily, ideas that are hard to express with current tech rarely occur to me, if I'm designing something physical I'll probably be thinking in the 2.5D way that you do with CAD without really understanding 3D structures, etc. I tried to get into paper notetaking for quite a while(but found the level of attention to each letter needed to be kind of exhausting) and I tried to learn art drawing, but I never really paid much attention to or thought about the idea of trying to get into any kind of sketching or diagramming on paper, it's not as heavily talked about as text notetaking, perhaps I should try as an experiment.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023). This lack of ubiquity of features happens because proprietary systems aren't interested in supporting other systems' features, because they're competing. It's literally caused by capitalism.

tivert 3y ago

> Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment. In other words, people can be fine with worse because they don't know better. One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023). > Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking. One of the strengths of paper is its flexibility: you can make pretty much any mark you want, not just marks approved and implemented by some 3rd party. You seem to be describing a situation where technical limitations (of digital systems) are so ingrained in people's thought processes that they have trouble thinking outside the little box they've been given.

ghaff 3y ago
Years ago I said something along these lines to the CTO of Novell and didn’t get a very satisfactory response. I do think shared collaborative documents have filled a bigger void than many expected. But I still feel the current situation is unsatisfactory.
eternityforest 3y ago
I think you pretty much have it spot on. Digital is the like another dialect of language that people think in. The paradigm is "I can very, very, easily make this set of marks, and I'm gonna build my process around them" rather than "I can make any mark I want and I'll spend the time to figure out exactly what marks and what process to use". It's incredibly easy and convenient, since it's all a prepackaged process with really only one medium, linear text, that only needs a tiny fraction of the skill... but we probably are losing something in the process. I never got into paper or handwriting, and gave up on drawing pretty quick after discovering how much harder it is than I expected, so I never really felt anything missing from paper when moving to digital, but thinking more about it, I definitely do think the tech shapes my thoughts pretty heavily, ideas that are hard to express with current tech rarely occur to me, if I'm designing something physical I'll probably be thinking in the 2.5D way that you do with CAD without really understanding 3D structures, etc. I tried to get into paper notetaking for quite a while(but found the level of attention to each letter needed to be kind of exhausting) and I tried to learn art drawing, but I never really paid much attention to or thought about the idea of trying to get into any kind of sketching or diagramming on paper, it's not as heavily talked about as text notetaking, perhaps I should try as an experiment.
Qwertious 3y ago
>One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023). This lack of ubiquity of features happens because proprietary systems aren't interested in supporting other systems' features, because they're competing. It's literally caused by capitalism.