2025-01-24

This morning’s journal image is very light on the processing. It was shot out of a hotel window in New York last year, on a Hasselblad 907x. I then turned it black and white, using a red filter, in Silver Efex Pro. No film effects or added grain.

True to my word, and following on from yesterday's piece, I deleted my Facebook, Instagram, Threads(!) and WhatsApp accounts this morning.

Coincidentally, I also stumbled upon Christine Rosen's new book "The Extinction of Experience" in Foyles bookshop this afternoon. The book is about how we are in danger of allowing digital technology to replace human experience, and that in turn got me thinking about my evolving philosophy of all of this stuff.

I used to be all about the whole Personal Knowledge Management, Second Brain thing; constantly trying out apps and attempting to figure out what the optimum method for storing my ideas and notes etc. And then, sometime towards the end of 2024, and with no obvious catalyst that I can think of, I just lost interest in all of it.

I still need to store links and ideas and notes, but I no longer need them to be referenced or linked or categorised. So long as there's some version of "Oh, it'll be in that box", I'm happy to rummage around and find what I'm looking for (and therefore also some stuff that I wasn't looking for too). If I have an idea, I'm more likely to write it down in a notebook than tap it into my phone.

As I say, I don't know why this happened, but it has slowed me down in the best possible way. And I think it has made me happier, more connected to what I'm doing, and an order of magnitude more creative. It's funny to think that I used to imagine that connections between ideas, carved in a digital space, would somehow spark new thoughts. In actual fact, new thoughts are sparked more frequently by physically writing with pen on paper, or even bashing ideas out on an old manual typewriter.

Likewise, I haven't picked up an e-reader for a while; I'm preferring physical books and I think (or imagine) that the ideas I read off a paper page seem to stick better than ones that come off a screen.

Technology is amazing, and I'm probably more optimistic about AI (in the right hands) than many are, but just because something is new doesn't make it better and just because something exists in the world, it doesn't mean we have to use it.

Christine Rosen counsels against letting human reality become a "user experience", and I think that's what Instagram is especially guilty of. When it first started, I enjoyed seeing people's photographs of weird and wonderful (and also mundane) things and places. But very quickly, we started to turn the camera on ourselves and a beautiful shot of the Alps became a pouting selfie with the Alps in the background. I suspect we can trace a lot of self-absorption and unhappiness back to that moment.

So I don’t expect to miss any of the Meta products, and I'm going to try not to let technology become anything more in my life than a sometimes-useful tool.

I’ve decided to email these daily pieces out, because they are far more widely read that way. If you don’t want to get these every day (believe me, I understand) then click “Unsubscribe” at the bottom of this email and deselect “Journal”. You’ll still get everything else, but not these.

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