Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten system doesn't impose a heirarchy upon it's contents and in some ways its structure anticipates the ideas of hypertext and the internet's structure.

Also similar to the idea from Umberto Eco: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Think of branches not as collections, but rather as conversations

When a branch starts to build, or prove itself, then ask the question (before indexing): "What is the conversation that is building here?"

Also related to Sönke Ahrens' maxim of seeking Disconfirming Information to counter Confirmation Bias. By thinking of branches as conversations instead of collectives, you are also more inclined to put disconfirming information within the branch.

The author goes into the correlation between categorization (branching) and the use of the index and the focus on them respectively. He mentions he "learned" that branching would be more beneficial than the using of the index to make finding the cards easier.

I strongly disagree with this focus. I agree with the "relational" principle of put the card between the one that has the closest proximital conceptual relation. The Zettelkasten's power relies in serendipitous creativity (or creativity/insight by chance), this is facilitated highly by the use of connectivity between cards, where each card as you go down the "hierarchy" of "branches" will be more unrelated to the original topic. (See also Luhmann's paper Communication with Zettelkasten, Manfred Kuehn Translation and Johannes F.K. Schmidt's article on Zettelkasten within Forgetting Machines, as well as his video presentation about Zettelkasten). In short, the friction of searching for cards by following trains of thought through connectivity boosters insight by chance and therefore facilitates the power of the system.

This is also, I believe, why Bob Doto argues to let categories emerge after the creation of notes/streams of thought instead of making the names for the "branches" up front.

I believe Luhmann himself also emphasized the use of the index by calling it a system of "query into the database," the index is the main navigational map for the Zettelkasten. If you have a question for your "communication partner" the index is the way to go. For example, if I wanted to know the impact of cognitive load theory within employee management as a CEO, I would go to my index and collect the entrances for both "branches" or terms, and then start reading these thought streams... Afterward, I might synthesize and create a new branch somewhere, in one of the aforementioned categories, or an entire new one, where I put the results of this questioning.

My own system of numbering and branching in this way is the following: A number signifies a note's position within a stream of thought. I branch off if, following the relational principle, a note adds unto a thought on a specific card, but not the stream specifically. This gets signified by a letter.

So, 1a1, 1a2, 1a3, and 1a4 are all part of the same stream while 1a, 1b, and 1c would all be different "branches" stemming from the original card that would be 1 in this case. This can repeat infinitely, therefore facilitating what Luhmann calls "Infinite potential for inward growth" of the system. It's autopoietic and cybernetic. (See also: The Radical Luhmann by Hans-Georg Moeller).

Something that can benefit the finding of notes once the system grows sufficiently large is the use of "structure" or "hub" cards where you put down a few key entrances to concepts related to this stream of thought or "branch" in remote sections of the Zettelkasten.

Seems similar to Communicating with an Antinet Zettelkasten.

This comes back to my 'tech smaller than us', governance and technological control over a tool should reside within the context-specific group of users using it. Which does not mean every single person within the group needs all the skills to control the tool, just that the group has it within itself, and decides on how that control is used a group. Vgl [[Networked Agency 20160818213155]] and [[Technologie kleiner dan ons 20160818122905]] n:: This would e.g. imply in Tarkowski's text that a community run instance would ensure having at least 1 member contribute code to Mastodon, and strategically operate to ensure that. Is this also an element wrt the above about Paradox of Open, as the non-monetary benefits of contributing may be well be enumerated as part of the operating costs of a community instance?

A beautiful example of a note that imbeds core zettels that simultaneously make connections within a Zettelkasten. Each page for a note displays the network of notes and their connections. The website is based on an open-source template

The source code for the site is here

reference for this quote? date?

Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

This is key imo : created by, with and for. Just for is not enough, with is the minimum. By is preferred if possible. If with, not by, then the community involved needs to be able to fully control deployment and settings. It must be within the scope of the user group.

While community tech is important, being a community is a pretty high threshold. For any group that is connected, and shares the same issue, can increase its agency with what is here defined as community tech.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220916075836/https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/the-case-for-community-tech-report-launch-and-fund-news-35784b6498f8

Alberto says of this https://twitter.com/alberto_cottica/status/1570357027485925378 'most communities gravitate towards tech minimalism: "community tech" is 95% community, 5% tech. And then funders lose interest.' Unless funders are from within the community I suppose. Goes back to networked agency / and the need for tech to be smaller than us, to be within scope of control of the people using the tech for a specific purpose.

Things that matter are a combination of things of interest plus sphere of influence/action radius. This can bring macro issues into a place where they can be addressed by micro actions that have meaning locally and contribute to the issue at scale. Contributes to the invisible hand of networks. Vgl [[Invisible hand of networks 20180616115141]]

Cathedral building or its more practical and common relative barn raising are expressions of communal effort, and a monument to a community's value/coherence. What a community creates for communal use can be proxy for its meaning. It's a result from community feeding back into community. I've also used the metaphor of mushrooms on mycelium (also comparing orgs to mushrooms)

Providing agency is rewarding in itself.

Doug Engelbart used acronym HLAMT wrt augmenting human intelligence: Humans using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, Training. Our artifacts are much more powerful now, language, methodology and training still need to catch up. Rheingold says we're on the verge of that.

Second thought: the A and M roughly map to tech and methods in my networked agency image as design aid. Think about netag in context of Engelbart's basic vision to elicit some more thoughts.

Just as eusocial creatures like termites create pheromone infused mudballs which evolve into pillars, arches, chambers, etc., a single individual can maintain a collection of notes (a commonplace book, a zettelkasten) which contains memetic seeds of ideas (highly interesting to at least themselves). Working with this collection over time and continuing to add to it, modify it, link to it, and expand it will create a complex living community of thoughts and ideas.

Over time this complexity involves to create new ideas, new structures, new insights.

Allowing this pattern to move from a single person and note collection to multiple people and multiple collections will tend to compound this effect and accelerate it, particularly with digital tools and modern high speed communication methods.

(Naturally the key is to prevent outside selfish interests from co-opting this behavior, eg. corporate social media.)

Alright Jerry, you got me, I'm in!

https://render.betaworks.com/thinkcamp-a-betaworks-accelerator-program-for-tools-for-thinking-de7e18bf5682

1. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 82f.

übersteigt völlig mein Forschungsprojekt - aber ein ANT Bericht über ein Beispiel - sagen wir Heather Lawver - wäre sicher interessant, weil die tatsächliche Verbindung so aufgezeigt werden könnte

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

Embodied cognition is a theory in psychology that a the mind is shaped by entire body of an organism. The mind is not only attached to the body, but the body influences the mind. Movement of the body doesn't just amplify one's spoke language, for humans, but it helps to create cognitive and communicative functions that language cannot, and these extend not only to viewers, but the communicator themself.

Steven Johnson identifies the three features of Scrivener which provide him with the most value.

Notice the close similarity of these features to those of a traditional zettelkasten: cards of text which can be linked together and rearranged into lines of thought.

One difference is the focus on the creation of folders which creates definite hierarchies rather than networks of thought.

isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.

The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Collecting thoughts is great, but there is more value in linking them, encouraging them to have sex, and making new and more exciting ideas.

Cross reference: Matt Ridley's When Ideas Have Sex https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex

From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

The sentiment that it is impossible to think without writing is patently wrong. While it's an excellent tool, it takes an overly textual perspective and completely ignores the value of orality an memory in prehistory.

Modern culture has lost so many of our valuable cultural resources that we have completely forgotten that they even existed.

Oral cultures certainly had networked thought, Luhmann and others simply can't imagine how it may have worked. We're also blinded by the imagined size of societies in pre-agricultural contexts. The size and scope of cities and city networks makes the history of writing have an outsized appearance.

Further, we don't have solid records of these older netowrks, a major drawback of oral cultures which aren't properly maintained, but this doesn't mean that they didn not exist.

Technology is providing us with the ability to build the most amazing commonplace books, thought spaces, and thinking machines, but somehow we're ignoring the power they have.

A fantastic example of the value of networked thought based solely on the ability of everyone's commonplace books to talk to each other.

Opening up social annotation and connecting it to a network of researchers' public-facing zettelkasten could create a sea-change of thought

This is a broader concept I'm developing, but thought I'd bookmark this question here as an indicator that others are also interested in the question though they may not have a means of getting there (yet).

Trying out ideas in public, for/with small networks, in a distinctive way brings compound rewards for you.

This is definitely a restatement of the idea of blogging as a thought space, but done perhaps in a broader context. Tom's experiments with Discord for creating and documenting online conversations also becomes a method of networked thinking that allows these discussions to aggregate and reach wider audiences.

This sounds a lot like a zettelkasten and the way it branches, it's just being done between multiple people and the zettelkasten instead of just one person.

It reminds me of conjecture mapping. Are we going to make the similar thing?

It's interesting to make this distinction. While I recognize that networked learning pre-dates the rise of the web, I suspect many students and educators would equate "network" with "the internet" at this point (and the internet means "Web 2.0" - that is, a collaborative space where the user/creator distinction is blurred).

Should I start exploring this too?

This is a very powerful idea.

Would love to hear Campbell or Kuh elaborate on this. Identifying "connections" as more important than identifying content/information? A new way for searching the Internet? Mining connections among content/people? Mining the connections I've made among content/people on the Internet?

Yes, yes, yes. Networked learning IS experiential. I am always on the lookout for opportunities to facilitate those experiences - for my students and myself, and consider every embrace of glorious messiness a significant victory.

With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.

This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...

Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.

The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.

Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.

What a beautiful and evocative series of sentences!