In the digital era, saving media is very default behavior for a lot of people. Everyone has lists, screenshots, or open tabs. I actually think it's quite charming that we can see a lot of our personalities in these buckets. If a secret agent would come along to find more about someone, he could stumble upon so many different things. A list in a girl's note app with all the boys she has ever kissed. A bulging spiral notebook with all kinds of ripped out recipes from magazines stuck in them. Saved voice memo's from a long-distance lover.
@yourstrulyaariya mentioned in the caption of one of her Instagram posts:
Maybe our saved folder is kind of like a museum of who we wish we were. Whenever we save things, it's either because it makes you inspired or because we think we will watch it later. Except a lot of times, we never go back to it. We feel often overwhelmed because of the cognitive overload, so we don't want to also go back and dig through our saved folder. Saving things might actually give us this fake productive feeling instead of actually doing the thing.
Saving things is kind of like a comfort blanket. Knowing it's there already does the trick. However, what she mentions overflown saved folders, it might not always be the best thing to "just save" something. Most people use notes as a bucket for storage while working through these notes and actually converting them into action or into something that can be used later could be more helpful. It takes more effort, of course.
There are a lot of personal knowledge moments tools, such as connected note-taking tools such as Obsidian, Roam or Logseq. Or collection apps such as Are.na, Sublime and Cosmos. Or even simpler just apps to save links and bookmarks such as Albo and Rodeo.
However, many of the topics in the PKM community (+ the digital-garden community + the journaling community) focus on organizing notes, the tooling to use, the ways to capture ideas. I actually would like to focus more on the thinking aspect.
Mindy Seu said in this Vanity Fair article:
To live and thrive online not just as an extremely logged-in individual but also as a society as a whole, the work of digital archiving - in connecting the dots and presenting context and remembering why it's called the web at all - might be the most radical act of all.
I think it is very helpful to still save the things that sparkle something inside of you. The small things accumulate over time and make it easier for you to build bigger things. Media on social media is quite fragmented and short and snappy (which makes sense with our short attention spans), I think a lot of creative people have the ambition to build a really, perfect thing. Something bigger. Not just for the prestige or the money, but to make something lasting.
Try to understand why you are saving the things you save. Look for the intention behind them. Find the inner structure. Let your curiosity bloom, and you'll get your unique point of view about it. You'll be able to really build things.
Reference
- Andy Matuschak writes a lot about evergreen note-writing