It’s oddly saddening to realize that when you enter “Notebook” into Google’s image search, the first two images that appear are of notebook computers.
I’ve started dragging a real notebook around with me lately, of the paper variety, and I’d almost forgotten what a great means of expression it is. Arrows drawn without finding the draw toolbar, tables without adding or subtracting columns, bad scrawl, worse diagrams — and all creative.
I wrote a lot of Knight in notebooks. Sure, I did the last long slogs entirely in a word processor, but the sheer amount of scribbling with pencil and paper (yes, I use pencil — mechanical pencil at that!) I did over its creation is really pretty amazing.
I haven’t written any of Lord in a notebook yet… but I think I’m working up to it. The notebook I have right now is unlined — better for thinking on paper, organic concept work, determining relationships, but not so good for writing text. Lord is a lot more complex, so having an unlined notebook is just right for now… but dialogue is starting to emerge, and it may be approaching the time to break out the lined notebook again.
So why is it sad that notebook computers pop up first in Google image search? Maybe it’s just me being a Luddite, but it strikes me that notebook computers are more often used for business and entertainment than for self-expression. Sure, there’s photoshop artists, and musicians, and modellers and animators and writers, myself among them, who all use notebook computers.
But a notebook, a sheaf of bound, blank paper, is always for self-expression. You can’t entertain yourself by staring at a blank notebook. Unless you draw little guys in the corners of the pages doing silly shit and flip through it fast — but even then, it’s not blank anymore, and you had to draw it, which means you exercised your creativity.
So with the notebook itself slowly losing dominant ownership of its own noun, is this a subtle hint that, as a culture, we value entertainment over expression?
Or is it just that notebook computers are a lot more interesting to look at? 
Regardless of one’s conclusion, the subtle irony I’ll leave this with is that the first entry in google text search for ‘notebook’ — after the inevitable ads for Dells and Sonys — comes up with a movie.
January 6th, 2006 at 9:14 am - Edit
I’d say, yes, this generation does value entertainment over creativity.
They’re being taught not to think for themselves anymore.
It’s not just the notebook but everything of it’s kind.
For example as a kid I could draw myself a creature on cardboard, cut it out, find a rock, a puddle, make myself an island and play with my new home made toy for hours imagining it’d be on some magical island.
if you’d suggest that to kids these days they’d probably look at you as if you were some kinda nutcase.
Parents buy the most outrageous toys for them, and so many of them they don’t even know what to play with and because of the lack of parents being around to teach them creativity and when they are around having them frown at imagination because it’s not real and therefore silly the kids get bored of things so fast that it’s impossible to keep them content.
So they either end up sitting behind a computer all day or go out to be little delinguents just to keep themselves amused.
ehrm.. heheh I guess your rant triggered a mini rant of my own.
Sorry about that XD
So anyways, yeah, I think the lack of imagination and the lack of a desire to have one, of this generation is probably why notebook computers are now the first entry.
Either that or because all businesses are now being automated and that’s what they buy now for their secretaries instead of paper notebooks since from a data archiving point of view they’re simply more efficient XD
January 6th, 2006 at 9:16 am - Edit
Typo edit *delinquent
January 6th, 2006 at 11:59 am - Edit
CARDBOARD BOXES!
I made the coolest things with cardboard boxes.
I made a complete set of Star Trek equipment when I was 5 — I had a Phaser (where the little mini-phaser even came off the top), a communicator where the top flipped and a tricorder. At one point I remember making a space shuttle console I could fly and a raygun with a styrofoam packing piece, cardboard and colored markers.
As for google text searches… might also be because there’s really very little to research about notebooks… I mean… they’re… paper. Sheets. Bound together. Pretty much it. :}
Seemed like a good topic for a rant tho… and while I wasn’t completely surprised that the computer came out on top, it was a little… unsettling.