The Notebook as Life Interface

Genius Loci readers:

A few days late in posting this, I write to you with a sense of joy. Sure, the holidays have something to do with it. But a bulk of the joy I feel comes from the realization that five days stand between me and the winter break. Granted, these five days will be five long ones with grading, emails, and meetings. But I can almost taste the glass of eggnog I will drink after reporting final grades to the college.

After a personal update, in which I discuss a month off social and algorithmic media, I’ll make the case for a notebook being the only interface one needs in life.

Personal Update: A Month Off the Algorithm

In response to last month’s Genius Loci, in which I complained about having too many inputs, an acquaintance recommended that I stay off algorithmic media (social media apps and sites, YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, etc.) for the month of November. I followed his suggestion and realized that the overwhelm I reported feeling had as much to do with the quantity of inputs as it did with the quality of my consumption. In other words, while the input overdose was real, the nature and subject of the media I had been consuming contributed to the frazzle. Media in the “creator economy” niche saturates the brain with all the things it could or should be doing, or it subconsciously reminds you that you need to catch up with these gurus who are “killing it.” Giving that up has proven helpful. This is not to say the clouds parted and the heavenly beams of productivity shone upon me. I still had work obligations — teaching, emails, meetings. But at least I felt a bit more at ease.

Somewhere in that ease, with my mind a bit calmer, I wrote an article called Servitude as a Service: Reading Kant in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I also read and wrote an analysis of Kalidasa’s epic Sanskrit poem The Birth of Kumara. Instead of podcasts, I listened to audiobooks. Two, in fact, both of which I recommend:

Keith Houston’s The Book is a wonderful history of the book. It touches on its constituent parts: paper, ink, writing, printing, design, and form. Book nerds will appreciate Houston’s sprawling, global history of the object we all can’t live without. It paired nicely with Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was such a gripping, insightful listen that I purchased a physical copy. Allen’s book traces the huge impact using notebooks had in history (more on this below). Allen shows how foundational notebooks were to the cultivation of arts, sciences, and commerce. Notebooks underpinned the commercial revolution during the Renaissance with double-entry bookkeeping. They advanced the arts, allowing artists to sharpen their skills. They enabled poets, thinkers, and writers to collect a mass of ideas that would otherwise vanish into the ether. Notebooks are foundational to human flourishing and progress.

Notebooks: The Only Interface You Need

If Roland Allen’s The Notebook helped me understand the extent to which notebooks have helped humans think, it also helped me reflect on my own notebook writing and thinking (and the impact digital devices have had on them both).

I started using a notebook in the early 2000s. For Christmas one year, my stepmother gave me a wonderful, little notebook with rough, fibrous paper. It was very clearly handmade, the ripped cover material folded over on the inside covers to form makeshift pockets. Deceptively light in weight, it was a beautiful object. But it was also an impractical one. It had pages of varying thickness, which only sometimes caused the ink to bleed through. The paper, prone to tearing under a fine nib, was scratchy to write on. I put the book down sometime in early 2005 with more than half its pages unwritten. In the half I used, I wrote travel narratives and other cringeworthy cultural observations. But I also noted exchange rates, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, card game scores, hostel and flight information, quotations, book titles, and fleeting thoughts. There are several strings of numbers, jottings of places and names, the meaning and contexts of which I have long forgotten. I sketched and drew in it, including a map of possible routes through Europe in winter 2005. I never went on that trip, but it dawns on me now that I am reviewing the map that I traveled along a few of the legs of the imagined itinerary many years later.

For that brief period in the early 2000s, before the days of smartphones, this notebook helped me remember, reflect, and ruminate.

I picked back up the note-taking habit in the early 2010s after returning from a stint in Spain. I regret not keeping one while I lived in Europe. What memories would that journal have preserved? I ask that question because my post-Spain journals idealize my time there. A notebook from that time would have captured memories and feelings now long forgotten. It too would have captured account numbers and passwords; random addresses, phone numbers, and names; sketches and drawings; bitching and complaining; notes on my research; scattered thoughts and half-baked insights; crappy poems; and it just might have pushed my life in a different direction. In short, it would have accumulated the evidence of a life lived.

My notebook wasn’t a tool. It was unmistakenly an interface for my life, an extension of my mind.

What is an interface? The word was first used to refer to a boundary between two separate objects or bodies. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan used it to describe the place where two discrete systems interact. Soon after McLuhan, the term was used to describe the object or apparatus connecting those systems (as in “a USB interface”). Now we might think of an interface as something that someone uses to help them control something else. What comes to mind is a computer terminal or a physical dashboard with buttons and knobs. In this imagining, the user is the central “system” in an interface, the agent that controls the action of the other non-human system. An email inbox and its software are thus communication interfaces. Social media and text messaging might be friendship interfaces, lamentably.

In our smartphones, we have interfaces for friends (social media, text messaging), for work (inboxes, Slack, dashboards), for entertainment (streaming platforms, algorithmic media), for commerce (marketplaces, payment and banking apps), for health (fitness trackers, telehealth portals), for learning (educational platforms, tutorial sites), for mobility (ride-sharing apps, navigation systems), for governance or access (digital IDs, authenticators, password managers), for productivity (habit trackers), etc. Smartphones have become the primary interfaces that stands between us and our lives.¹

Despite the smartphone acting as interfaces for much of our external lives, we seldom acknowledge that we’re missing an interface for our inner lives. We use interfaces to communicate with others, but seldom do we use them to communicate with ourselves. Even the idea of communicating with oneself carries negative connotations. Despite nearly all of us sustaining an inner monologue at all times, the idea persists that only lunatics talk to themselves. To “get in touch with oneself” seems woo-woo or suggests a deficiency: you need to get in touch with yourself because you’re out of touch. Keeping a notebook or journaling is often characterized as childish, immature, romantic, or (for a man) effeminate.² Journaling now treads too close to self-help, “life hacking,” and productivity circles that to keep one is now to suggest you’re trying to “optimize” your life because you, or your life, is suboptimal.

The Case for Notebooks

Despite (or beacuase of) this, I keep coming back to the one interface that doesn’t make me feel like quitting: the old-fashioned notebook.

When compared to a digital device, a notebook has distinct advantages. Firstly, its value is non-transferrable. Nobody is eager to steal a notebook off a table or snatch one out of your hand. Using one doesn’t promise any renumeration. In it, we follow our own minds, thoughts, and interests instead of being distracted or strung along by some algorithm. It therefore feels clean and satisfying to use one, free of any implicit or explicit transaction.

But what about digital note-taking? For me, physical notebooks are better than digital ones. The main reason is because I struggle to stick with one digital note-taking system: I have notes in Apple Notes, some in Obsidian, some in iA Writer, some I sent to myself in emails, and some I keep in Zotero. None has ever felt quite right. No wonder I feel scattered. What’s more, note-taking software puts guardrails around your interactions with it. It forces you to interact with it in a certain way. It constrains you to text-based input and reminds you when your writing isn’t grammatical. The physical notebook doesn’t remind you if the word you invented isn’t in a dictionary. It doesn’t alert you if your passionate burst is fragmentary. It doesn’t prevent you from drawing, sketching, gluing, pasting, or blotting. It doesn’t conceal your penmanship, your shaky sentences reminding you that you were on a plane or bus, or your quick hand a reminder of your anger. It is a direct interface with oneself, as unmediated as you can get.³ No data collected, no privacy policies to confirm, no batteries to charge.

The notebook as interface works well because it is not meant for anyone else. It prefigures an intellectual solitude that results in intellectual authenticity and honesty. It allows us to confront our own thoughts, unadulterated, anywhere.

What makes a notebook such an important life interface is its physicality. The physical act of using a notebook — our muscles, our motor skills — helps us process information. And when we write a note in a notebook, it exists in physical space, not in a digital one that can scroll away, that isn’t fixed in space. The physical aspect of note-taking is what has been so helpful for thinkers throughout history.

Typing notes on a device doesn’t offer the same tactile feedback. It doesn’t carry the same emotional resonance. Perhaps this is sentimental, rooted in a growing aversion to the digital encroachment into our lives. But digital note-taking has never felt satisfying. What’s satisfying is the physical, tactile nature of the analog notebook — making a mark on the material world, smudging graphite, smearing ink. Most of us would agree that writing (and receiving) a handwritten letter hits differently.

In his chapter on Charles Darwin, Roland Allen discusses Darwin’s note-taking habits. Of course Darwin took field notes, capturing observations while traveling on the HMS Beagle. But Darwin also had a dedicated notebook to think out loud — to ask questions, interrogate himself, challenge and test ideas. It was his inner monologue made material. In this way, notebooks are prime examples of interfaces. They don’t just record the evidence, artifacts, and residue of life. Rather, they help us negotiate life, make sense of it, and develop ideas.

When used, a physical notebook ceases to be a tool and becomes an extension of the mind.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB