[Monthly Digest] April 2024
This month we've discussed creativity, multi-modal “stuff” to throw into your Personal Data Lake and how offloading everything to AI impacts mental exercise.
April’s almost over, and I hope everybody here celebrates the feeling of being a month wiser.
A few recent events from the personal knowledge management ecosystem, such as
’s announcement of his first in-person Second Brain Summit1, as well as my reading of ’s “The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time”2, once again, made me feel PKM was currently on the rise of its Creative (bell) Curve.There’s a lot of appetite for note-taking/making, digital gardening, and Notion-ising everything. The numbers of book sales and investment rounds raised by developers of digital Tools for Thought (TfT) indicate that it’s still a niche, but it could be on its way to the mainstream.
I often cite participants of PKM events whose needs have been crystallised: I want all of the data I’ve accumulated in the form of notes, photographs, voice memos, and video clips put into (what I like calling) a Personal Data Lake (PDL), connect them, and use technology to “have conversations” with their second brains3 the way Niklas Luhmann did4. Little did this German sociologist know that an unprecedented AI boom would soon allow us to build so-called Knowledge Bases or even use separate documents to converse with our “stuff”. We can only speculate about what it might lead to.
This month, I took the liberty of sharing some of my thoughts on creativity, multi-modal “stuff” to throw into your PDL (Personal Data Lake) and the fact that offloading everything to AI is probably not what you need if you like the idea of getting some brain exercise.
Here’s the recap of this month’s worth of issues in case you’ve missed them:
Should we decrease or increase the stakes to trigger creativity? The answer is a typical “it depends,” as it’s highly personal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth asking.
This is my personal take on the state of affairs in the publishing business, with a suggestion on how to work around content brain-washing in the modern literary universe.
Chances are a big chunk of your PDL will be images rather than mindfully handwritten thoughts. This way of extending cognition has become increasingly popular because it’s frictionless and cheap. Some folks, like Vannevar Bush, saw this coming5. It’s interesting to compare futuristic ideas before and after.
And that’s our month of April 2024, knowledge engineers.
I’d especially like to thank people like
, , and for pointing their knowledge firehoses at me and reminding me how much is still to learn. Chapeau et merci.https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/summit
Gannett, A. (2018). The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time. Random House.
Forte, T. (2022). Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Simon and Schuster.
Luhmann, N. (1981). Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht. Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel/Public ….
Bush, V. (1979). As we may think. ACM Sigpc Notes.