Peter Croce Project

robert-brydie:

Glad to see a post on this.  The end section of Mills’ The Sociological Imagination was what encouraged me to start actually jotting down various thoughts that came to mind instead of constant “notes to self” in my mind sure to fade away by the next day.  It remains one of the few short texts I’ve found of an academic explaining how they work and as a bonus one that was actually useful to read.  The article from the link recommends Tumblr and Posterous which I think limits what Mills was suggesting.  After the quoted section he explains how he keeps a number of notebooks for storing thoughts, notes from readings and research etc etc and regularly shifts through and rearranges the notes in order to bring areas for further thought and research to the the surface.  I’ve found OneNote and NVivo useful for this whereas Tumblr is better for jotting down any passing quotes or small rantings but isn’t productive towards more detailed note taking.  

Do you value your ideas? If you’re reading this website then chances are you answered ‘yes’ to that question. Yet unless you record all your ideas I’d argue that you don’t value them. At least not as much as you could. It’s a difficult habit to acquire and it can be time-consuming. But technology is making it so much easier. If you have a smart phone, use twitter or blog then you have easy outlets for both recording your ideas and making them publicly available.

In the appendix to Sociological Imagination, entitled On Intellectual Craftsmanship, C. Wright Mills advocates keeping a file or journal within which to record your ideas. He argues that doing so:

encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience […] by keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.

So why not start? Tools like Posterous or Tumblr can be great places for ‘online scrapbooks’ or ‘ideas gardens’.  Though of course not all our ideas are good. But I take Wright-Mills to be saying that it’s only through recording our ideas in such a file that we become able to properly evaluate them and that, in doing so, we learn to keep ourselves intellectually alive.

If only you all saw my Evernote…

(via fyeahsociology)