Friday October 18, 2024; 12:56 PM EDT
- They say the highlighter marker pen was invented by Dr. Frank Honn in 1962. By the time I was a young teacher they were common in schools. Students would read a chapter and run the highlighter across terms or sentences that they thought were important. Sometimes you'd see a school book with great swaths of florescent yellow highlighting on page after page. Usually there would be no written comments in the margin, so a student would have to reread the material to remember why it mattered. It was a profoundly inarticulate form of note-taking. Florescent yellow meant "something matters over here." What matters? Usually there was no clue. You'd have to hope a person might be able to recreate the thought while rereading. Other students, using pencils or pens, might very well jot a few words in the margin at the same place, preserving something of the thought, the judgment, the value perceived in the passage. The student using the highlighter threw all that away -- the fruits of a first reading, abandoned.#
- Since school has so many layers of alienation going for it, maybe that's not surprising. If I can't see the use of the material any time soon in my life, why bother to pin down its value? Why bother to do the work to integrate the best part of the reading into my own thinking and experience?#
- When I first taught a course in writing for the web, with an emphasis on marketing and activism, many students would write tweets the same way they used highlighters. Using a link, they'd point to something that seemed valuable, but they wouldn't introduce any of their own thinking into the tweet or the brief blog post. They'd abandon any clues to their own thinking and satisfy themselves with pointing, with saying, essentially, "Hey, over there at that web page, yeah, that one in the link, you might find something you want to read. I'm not going to tell you what I cared about there, you figure it out!"#
- Linking done that way is an assertion of value, but nobody can tell what value is being asserted. "You figure it out!" is a dismal form of human exchange.#
- But nobody who came to enjoy blogging stopped there. In many circumstances, a post would offer a link or two, and the writer would talk about the value -- would at least introduce a clue to a line of thought that the reader could follow up on. There was a notable blog-theory post maybe twenty years ago that spoke of a model blog post being a value-added proposition. You offer one or more worthwhile links and you introduce them and your interest in them at least briefly. You put down some markers, saying, "Here's what I was thinking . . ." You preserve the mental activity of reading for yourself and for your future readers to build on.#
- That's linking practiced as a value-added proposition. By itself, a link builds out the structure of the web just a little more, but a value-added link makes that new part of the web's structure a little richer. It's part of the generosity of the web that early users remember fondly, I think. It's part of the reason the web made people hopeful. #
- We have to have communities of readers for this value-added linking and blogging practice to pay off. The first level of payoff is when people exchange ideas and grow them through conversation. Many early bloggers remember this experience pretty keenly, I suspect. I didn't start in until about 2003, not terribly early, but I remember it.#
- But from the start people described and criticized bloggers as isolated figures typing away, often for no payoff and no results. There's some truth to the description. Part of the challenge that has often not been met was to turn the isolation of writing into collaboration and action in the world. I send out my messages but only very slowly do I see anything happen as a result. Fair enough. We may not have the right temperament for collaboration and we may not quite have the tools for teaming up, I'm not sure.#
- Nevertheless, writers who read and share links, who track their thinking about the reading and add value to the links by preserving what they're thinking, are doing something that has sometimes paid off for individuals and groups. #
- Bloggers tend to believe in reading, in thinking about reading, in writing about reading. They tend to believe in practicing worthwhile things like reading and writing every day. They tend to understand that reading and thinking begin, at least, as solo operations, even if in a better world the full fruits of reading and writing are more widely social and political.#
- Ideas need to circulate to have power, even if the circulating takes decades. The web where ideas circulate might begin with typing, with screens and electrons, but unless the ideas make the jump into the parallel social and political web, the ideas are doomed. People with skills and tools carry or transfer ideas sourced from the digital web out into the social and political web, though we don't talk much about how that happens. With persistence and good fortune, those ideas come to reside in people's philosophy, to be embodied in society's institutional practices, in laws, economic structures, and so forth. I'm not sure if there's a basic theory in place for that transfer and embodiment part of the life cycle of ideas or not. Maybe you know one.#
- I'm pretty sure that reading and writing, tracking and sharing thinking, will be part of that theory, and the use of a highlighter pen will not be. And that's why I have a blog.#