Writing Slowly

I stumbled across Tim Berners-Lee’s 1995 talk on “Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny” last month, and while it hasn’t exactly transformed how I think about writing notes, it has certainly confirmed the direction I’ve already been working slowly towards.

There’s a lot of discussion online about the best systems and apps for taking notes, and poeple keep devising new ones almost every day, but this is missing something revolutionary that’s hiding in plain sight. The inventor of the World Wide Web wasn’t just solving how computers share information—he was creating a blueprint for how our minds should work.

This got me reflecting how I’ve been looking to create/adapt/bodge together a method for writing that suits the strange way I think, rather than just accepting someone else’s off-the-shelf offering, however flashy. My own bespoke creative working environment.

So, according to Berners-Lee, how should our minds work?

Categorical Thinking Is a Trap

Traditional note-taking systems lock us into categories that limit rather than liberate our thinking. This is exactly the problem that Vannevar Bush, one of Berners-Lee’s intellectual heroes, identified decades ago. In Berners-Lee’s words:

“The problem Bush was addressing, or the problem of the individual researcher, was one of system topology. The poor person has successively narrowed and narrowed his or her field of interest in order to cope with the information overload, and soon is connected only to things of very local interest.”

In the past I’ve certainly experienced this. Notes tucked away in separate categories create knowledge silos. According to Berners-Lee the uncomfortable truth is that these systems fail us when we need them most:

“The topology clearly doesn’t work, because there is no path for the transfer of knowledge from one discipline and the next.”

Every category we create essentially generates another silo — isolated and cut off from the cross-pollination that creates genuine insight.

I’ve previously written about Gottfried Leibniz, one of the last great polymaths, who was able to make innovations in several different fields partly because he didn’t keep his wide-ranging thought in neat compartments, but in thousands of pages of unruly notes which he had no compunction to cut up and rearrarange. It’s hard to imagine what a person like this would have been able to do with the World Wide Web.

The Web Structure Liberates Knowledge

Berners-Lee offered a solution that applies perfectly to personal notes:

“In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes.”

His revolutionary insight?

“For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

Traditional note-taking is like navigating with only predetermined routes. Web-structured notes give you the entire network, plus spontaneous shortcuts you never knew existed.

Keywords Restrict Natural Connections

Even our keywords and tagging systems can be too restrictive. In his 2006 paper on “Linked data - Design issues”), Berners-Lee warns about conceptual centralisation:

“If we make a knowledge representation system which requires anyone who uses the concept of ‘automobile’ to use the term ‘www.kr.org/stds/indu… then we restrict the set of uses of the system to those for whom this particular formulation of what an automobile is works.”

This seemingly technical point has deep implications for me as I’m writing and organising my notes. When I force myself to use rigid terminology or standardised keywords, I’m limiting the very connections my mind naturally wants to make. I’m not totally against using keywords, but Berners-Lee appears to be sounding a warning that has made me think a little more reflectively about what they entail.

Photo by Valeria Hutter at Unsplash.

Connected Notes Mirror Your Mind (OK, my mind)

The future of note-taking, in my humble opinion, isn’t about better folders or fancier apps, nor is it about succumbing to AI to write it all for us — it’s about reimagining how ideas connect. Taking a little bit of inspiration from Berners-Lee here’s what works for me:

• Create notes that link directly to related thoughts, regardless of category
• Use and even create my own language, rather than forcing standardised terms
• Allow connections to form organically, mirroring how my mind actually works ( I mean, I think that’s how my mind works)
• Focus on relationships between ideas, not so much on their classification

I’m trying to make it so my notes aren’t just a neat archive of what I’ve learned. Instead I want them be a dynamic reflection of how my thoughts work, so my writing process stays generative rather than restrictive. And my mind doesn’t work in folders and subfolders. It works in connections and associations that span domains and categories. The rhizome not the tree.

I expect there are people whose minds really do work in categories and who prefer to keep their notes in clear and fairly rigid folders. That might well work for someone else, but it’s not the only way to do things, and I found it interesting that the founder of the World Wide Web didn’t especially admire this approach.

And it might not just be about how my individual mind works. Perhaps it’s about how the world works too. Maybe the World Wide Web has been successful in part because it facilitates the expression of the web-wide world. One of the things I’ve appreciated from re-reading Berners-Lee is his vision of a Web that rather than constraining us, helps us to network both knowledge and people.

“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.”— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

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