Tools like DevonThink push at the limitations of our personal memories, though, by (a) never forgetting (like I do, frequently), and (b) making connections that we ourselves may not.

To connect a few pieces, the publicizing of the private that Lowe and Williams point to would also be significantly impacted by these tools as our individual memories become public record (as it were). This could have a profound impact not only on the way we write, think, and communicate as academics, but could profoundly redefine how public space is created and controlled via public memory that is an amalgomation of thousands of individual psuedo-private memories. (There are, of course, a ton of angles on this statement, including access, privileging, democratizing, automating, and many more that we won't go into here).

Another angle that grabs my attention, perhaps one that calls for more caution, is our depence on technologies for remembering things. Becky quips about losing her brain when her PDA craps out, but it really causes a breakdown in the structure of her life. She has a difficult time knowing what to do when, finding information like addresses and numbers, etc. While these tools are very useful for organizing and planning, they can also take over in such a way as to make us forget to use our own memories. These machines can strip us of some of our ability to think and respond as we give those tasks over to mechanized processes.

Puts an interesting Cyborg spin on things, doesn't it?

"Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon."

By the by, will someone tell me how to do those cool boxes you're using for pulled out quotes, Collin and Tyra? And also how to add in a link for referencing the article?
Perhaps in class Thursday....

DevonThink looks exciting. It makes me think of a world of what the New Age philospher Ken Wilber calls intelligibilia. While the blog is remediating an ancient print technology, the journal, and suggesting some kind of continuity in its function, the source of remediation here seems to come less easily to hand, which I think is a tremendous advantage for creating new uses and writing spaces. DevonThink suggests something more like the inside of the human brain. However, it still seems to have very much what van Dijck called an individual signature? What would a collaborative dimension on this look like? I wonder