Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
I want to know the source of the quote.
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Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” 1
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MOC: [[050 Quotes MOC]]
A great metaphor for the Internet.
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Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. 1
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Zettelkasten and commonplace books are able to show a bit of the character of their creators in physical form.
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As a spiritual principle of order, card boxes show the inner physiognomy of their owners 1
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translated from Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie | syndication link↩︎
a list of German Zettelkästen users who were well known. Many of them were writers or researchers professionally.
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Jean Paul, who can be considered the poetic father of cardboard box technology and celebrates his 250th birthday on March 21, Arno Schmidt and Walter Kempowski, Hans Blumenberg, Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann and Aby Warburg 1
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translated from Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie | syndication link↩︎
Writer Jean Paul on the importance of his Zettelkästen.
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“In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first,” instructed the poet Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812. 1
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translated from Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie | syndication link↩︎
songlines as an umbrella abstraction for other cultural structures and features
Lynne Kelly’s observation that oral cultures revised useful knowledge into their memories appears to me to be a simple precursor to annotation and the idea of the scientific method all in one…
Songlines have managed to abstract many useful items into one super-structure: memories are certainly directly at the top, but it also includes culture, knowledge management, scientific method, annotation, survival mechanisms, social cohesion (?), others?
Expansion of notes on 2021-06-09 at 9:00 AM:
[open questions]: What other examples are there in cultures and societies of bigger overarching abstractions like this? None come immediately to mind, but surely they exist. I would imagine that a good government would identify these and build upon and empower them.
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[[Joining the ‘great conversation’ — The fundamental role of annotation in academic society]] | syndication link
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- How is this related to other abstractions?
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