There's a mismatch between me and my writing tools. They seem to want something slightly different from what I want. I wonder if anyone else has this feeling? I mean there's plenty of people who are apparently on a life-long quest to find the perfect app, because they still haven't found what they're looking for. What's up with that? Well this article made things a lot clearer for me: Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity | Kei Kreutler. Kreutler argues we've conflated all memory with computer memory. That's to say we've assumed everything can be stored and retrieved as data. But this misses something crucial, which is that the kind of memory that shapes worlds requires transmission, relationship, and context, and not just storage. And this got me thinking: doesn't this apply to our digital writing tools? They have to store our writing as data, but in doing so they change it in subtle ways we might not even notice, except as the kind of vague unease I've been feeling. Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it. So am I over-thinking it again, or have you too felt a gap between what you want to do and what your writing tools expect you to do?
reply to u/atomicnotes at https://reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1qjrnp8/why_dont_my_notemaking_tools_work_the_way_i_want/
In older analog offices, the office worker stored things on paper in piles, in folders, in various locations within their office. Because humans have excellent spatial memory, the worker would have an idea of what he might want and would know in which pile on their desk or which filing cabinet it might be filed in. Despite what may look like a messy office, most will know exactly where certain papers are "hiding". This overlaps with older indigenous cultures and artificial memory with structures like songlines, talking rocks, and later techniques from ars memoriae like method of loci or memory palaces. For more on this cross reference Hudson & Thames' First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neale.
Entirely digital-based methods have erased a lot of these sorts of locational affordances.