The Commonplace book

Commonplace book

This is the transcript of a lecture that Johnson gave at Columbia U.  In it, he talks about the importance of the commonplace book in the 18th century.  The commonplace book was where thinkers (Thomas Jefferson, for example) recorded quotations from books they were reading along with their own thoughts as a way of educating themselves and keeping track of what they were learning.  More importantly, for Johnson, these thinkers would often review their commonplace books randomly, stimulating new ways of thinking and identifying new, unexpected connections between ideas.  Unexpected connections (serendipity), Johnson explains, is the key to innovative thinking.  The web now works this way, he says, because, with a simple click or a key word search, browsers (and other software) can bring up information that's connected in all kinds of ways.