Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

🫧 Open on Bubbles

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0

I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.

Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan's position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn't seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.

What Was the Purpose

There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan's argument about Personal Knowledge Management:

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It's taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?

Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven't. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.

The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:

I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been c…