🐇 where I still continue to tumble down the index card rabbit hole 🕳

Yesterday, I happened upon the tantalizing bit of information that Carl Linnaeus is credited with the invention of index cards. The short version is that, vexed by dealing with oodles of information, he put it on smaller bits of paper so he could better organize it and move it around. Information overload.

In the days when I used to spend more time sailing across the land in a giant metal skybird, I would look out the wonder portal and ponder…what is everyone down there thinking about. I wanted Wings of Desire style-subtitled captions of those thoughts.

Were I on a plane at this moment, I suspect that I would not be sky-sailing over entire cities full of people imagining origin stories of office products.

Yet, to frame it rather optimistically, Google Trends suggests I am not utterly alone in this index card interest. To clarify, my search, it is more of a fascination with the acquisition, assembly, organization, and retrieval of information. It is about how tools and technology transform our interactions and imaginings and how the extended self fits into all of it.

Index cards once lived long, perhaps even happy lives in libraries, offices, schools, offices, hospitals, and homes — and so on. Indeed, there were a proliferation of patents for means to manage this abundance of information-laden card stock.

The the incomplete historian in me sees patterns and sameness. I think about the vast fields of data farms, those endless acres of information, waiting to be retrieved, like card catalogs of the 21st century, as the lone and level sands stretch far away.

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