From now on I’m not blogging I’m ‘Commonplacing’
Read this in Steven Johnson’s ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, and although I’m in no way comparing what’s written here to the gents mentioned in this passage, it did make think blogging is both important and has its roots in the practices of the great thinkers of our time. Love the idea of hunches, thoughts and ramblings layering up into something potentially groundbreaking in the future…
oh…have added in somewhat cynical but nonetheless possible changes in [brackets]
‘Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a ‘commonplace’ book [tumblr, wordpress, posterous]. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters [smart people, junior smart people, the vain] - just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period-Milton, Bacon, Locke [Shirky, Russell Davies, Perez Hilton]- were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing [idea-sharing] powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, ‘commonplacing’ [blogging], as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading [commenting on the topics of the day], assembling a personalised encyclopedia of quotations [uploading cool youtube videos]. There is a distinct self-help [Self-promotion] quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to ‘lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what useful in the several pursuits of life’ [A collection of interesting stuff and nonsense to look back]
