Instead of personal knowledge management coming from the need to restore control over our attention and knowledge, it can come from the desire to explore and create. David Foster Wallace describes this as an “intellectual adventure.” We don’t restore meaning and patterns, we find them. Our relationship to information can be exploratory and curious.
For me – I mean, a lot of the motivation had to do with, it seems to me, that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is essentially narrative, but that structurally it’s a bit different.1
- Does what we’re managing affect our relationship to it? In 4a Opera queens are embodied personal information management, the curating of opera queens almost comes off as anxious while also being about excitement and love.