Recently I was ruminating on the idea of how our digitized world is not very sustainable. When I speak of sustainability I refer to the ability to continue down a certain path and be able to continue with this process and maintain it at a certain level indefinitely. Now, I do not believe our current path of “digitizing” everything is entirely feasible, and in my opinion it is definitely not sustainable. We encounter issues on a daily basis regarding our passion for digitizing everything. We sometimes lose our digital artifacts on our hard drives or we simply lose everything on a corrupted hard drive. We misplace our digital media (cds + dvds); we have energy (battery) problems with our electronic devices and are not able to use our digitized media anytime, anywhere, without a source of energy. Furthermore, we have trouble synchronizing our media players and continue to live in a digital world which breeds incompatibility issues through proprietary products and services.

Where am I going with this stream of thought? Well, simply stated, I believe that there is a limit to the “digital” world and that we are reaching that limit. Many of us are simply tired of our dependency on electronics and digitized media and want to return to what is tried and true and what feels most comfortable to us. Paper is one of those basic composites in our lives that we are confortable with and love. Hand in hand with “paper” we are now engaged in a “Pencil Revolution” to reclaim our right to record our creativity on humanities medium of choice, paper! I firmly believe that we will start to see more and more people rediscovering paper-based journaling in our digitized world, and products like Moleskine, which have a incredible heritage of creating products which support the capturing of human creativity, will be on the forefront of this shift back to basics.

I am not a neo-luddite, and most importantly, I am not against information and communications technologies. I simply want to find a balance between what is digitized in my life and what is not digitized. I find capturing thoughts within a notebook very personal and far more elegant then lugging around a laptop looking with free Wifi and electrical outlets.

What are your thoughts?