< Give Me Liberty...OR...Give Me Convienence? ^¥^
I feel exactly this way. This is the reason that I cannot, for the life of me, bring myself to do any of that digital notetaking. I have been copying, by hand, the yijing to a notebook I bought for it, when it would be a lot easier to just copy-paste it to a text file to keep for reference.
Part of it is that I find electronics to be completely unrealiable. At any moment they may bust. Of course, paper may get soaked, or burn, just as well. But I still feel more things could go wrong with computers, and it still requires other computers to retrieve data from a hard drive. Now with our "blackbox" devices that make it even harder to retrieve the storage that's inside a device...
There is another benefit. Copying the text by hand implies I have to read it while I do. Even if I don't understand most of it (it's classical chinese), I still get to read it and more or less try to make sense of it as I do. If I simply copy-paste the thing, sure it's a lot quicker, but I may never actually see the text, because I'm not making myself read it. I may wait forever until my grasp of classical chinese is good enough...
Also if I go to the river and I want to write my thoughts, I'd look like a sucker taking out my laptop there. And writing on a touchscreen is torture. Even if it weren't, I wouldn't want to be dealing with a screen /at all/ when I'm out in nature. I would like to be less screen-bound and spend more time outside, in the river, in the mountain looking over the distance, on the beach, or wherever. I don't want to be looking at a screen, at all.
Replies
oooh, classical chinese, very nice
there was a brief time where i was enthralled
by ancient chinese culture
and texts including the i-ching
i still read some, mostly taoism related stuff
yeah, if i am writing something down as i read
a text i can more easily recall it and access that
knowledge
which science has proven is the case overall
with knowledge retention
in fact, i read an article recently that mentioned
that students had a better grasp of material
when they engaged with a physical medium
like a book versus a digital text
Source