According to Microsoft, the application OneNote lets you “combine the power of digital ink with the natural feel of a pen…sketch, annotate and highlight.” Copywriters advertising digital software love tricolons. The productivity tool Notion apparently helps users “write, plan and collaborate”- a slogan placed centrally on their website’s opening page. You could “dream it up, and jot it down” with an Apple Pencil, which retail from $219 AUD.
My pen of choice is a Pilot 6-207 in black, which costs $4.99 from Officeworks. It writes notes smoothly and dries quickly. I am afflicted by a neuroticism that does not seem to affect others, best described as an ‘obsessive personality.’ As a result, I refuse to write with any other pen.
Note taking is an integral aspect of both my life and our wider typographic culture – highlighted through the ubiquity of digital programmes which apparently aid in project development and management. However, this shift away from print based forms forces us to think critically about digital writing and editing.
Bettina Funcke describes a note as a “trace, a word, a drawing that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea.” Put differently, marking a page with a note makes a thought real. Contrastingly, digital notes are defined by their intangibility. They can be permanently deleted, erased, and are stored in a non-physical, mythical like entity called “The Cloud.”
This raises questions about the implications digital writing tools have on creativity. Do softwares like OneNote, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Notion enhance creative freedom? Or do they restrict it? More urgently, does the immateriality of these softwares rid creative production of its human characteristics? The answer appears as a long winded advertisement for Moleskine.
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Humans have transcribed the monotonous aspects of their everyday life for centuries. In Ancient Mesopotamia around 1750 BC, a dissatisfied customer called Nanni addressed a letter of complaint to the merchant Ea-Nasir. The complaint was recorded on a clay tablet, and claimed that the merchant sold poor quality copper. Ancient graffiti from the Romancity Pompeii hasrecently been excavated; over 2,000 years ago, a patron scrawled “I screwed the barmaid” on the walls of a bar.
What fuels the urge to transcribe? Perhaps we are passionate about terrible customer service, or enjoy boasting about sexual encounters. Personally, I am afflicted by the obsessive belief that one day I will wake up and forget everything. I’ll start the car only to mix up the accelerator and brakes, or forget to breathe in oxygen and release C02. So, firstly, recording means remembering. It serves as a visual reminder of what I have learnt, and what interests me. Secondly, I transcribe hoping that one day the mindmaps, bullet points, and preliminary sketches will lead me to that final epiphany – a singular sentence which clarifies everything.
Anyone committed to notetaking knows that it is a serious art: Samuel Beckett wrote the original French and English drafts of Waiting for Godot in an A3 lined notebook. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin kept a record of every book he had read since he was 18. During 1927, Benjamin kept a journal that recorded musings and descriptions of the streets of Paris. The diary uses a navigational guide based around colour and symbols to organise excerpts and quotes. Nikola Doll highlights that Benjamin’s colour coded system represents the psychological tension between structure and the “potential of the open field of interest.” The notebook reminds us that creativity occurs in the space between structure and chaos.
Partially inspired by Benjamin’s note taking system, I recently attempted to categorise my various notebooks thematically. However, my attitude towards daily life is at best hedonistic, and at worst careless. My system failed – a journal originally intended for beginners French writing exercises is now marked with notes about calling electricity locals, booking the dentist, and feeling depressed.
Digital writing softwares thus fulfill my need for structure, which I often neglect in the routines and habits of daily life. At their most basic, these programs are a simulacrum of objects: pen and paper, clocks, or highlighters. Tools like headings, toggle lists or highlighters give the illusion that creative production and ideas can be systematically organised. Literary critic Katherine Hayles puts it well: “one of the insights electronic textuality makes inescapably clear is that navigational functionaries are not merely ways to access the work but part of a works signifying structure.”
Hayles point becomes abundantly clear when I consider my font of choice – Times New Roman. The font was created by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, and was visually inspired by a style of typeface popular in Early Modern European print. Times New Roman is popular in academic writing and newspapers because of its readability and crisp design. Thus, the fonts’ association with highbrow intellectual texts gives my work a veneer of prestige and sophistication.
Elaborating on this, indents signify a new paragraph, while italics emphasise important points or words.
Bold Headings with Capitalisation Signal A New Idea, or Body Paragraph
The google document thus offers something the page could never: an appearance of order, of structure.
The productivity software Notion does more than just organise notes and documents – advertising itself as a personalised “workflow.” Upon reflection, I don’t know what “workflow” actually is; apparently it refers to a series of processes, or steps that are needed to complete tasks. Workflow is one of those semantically empty phrases you encounter a lot in the contemporary climate, like “supercharge” and “productivity.” Coincidentally, One Note lets you “supercharge your productivity.”
Do tools like daily time blocking planners, calendars, toggle lists, dividers actually make production easier? Or do they fundamentally alter the creative process? These digital instruments are useful as they make editing and research easier, and store one’s assortments of notes and drafts in a singular database. However, these tools constantly survey and measure output – making the writing process synonymous with efficiency.
Digital documents quantitatively measure written work through word counts. Moreover, calendar applications allocate tasks to time slots, positioning users to produce work under timed demands. Personally, these tools have served as a stark visual reminder of my personal failures: I sulk at my desk heavy with shame because 467 words were written between 10-11am, when the goal was 500.
For centuries, the people of the past have revealed themselves to us through marginalia inscriptions on books, in personal diaries, through letters. These notes are written under intimacy of the private realm, and are a visual representation of the mind in a state of orbit. Digital tools thus fail to capture the essence of creative production, and the trials and tribulations that arise in the writing process.
