Tomorrow Elephant

It looks like analog is the new digital among alpha geeks. The vanguard of this trend is the Moleskine notebook which is being touted as a PDA replacement and a creativity enhancer. Sort of like the iBook of notebooks: they are a bit pricey, but look very nice and have a huge cult following.

So, what’s the reason behind the Moleskine phenomenon? Bruce Sterling recently pointed out that the gizmos that our culture generates (as epitomised by the camera mobile phone) actually have more features than you can reasonably be expected to master within the products’ lifetime. It’s not surprising that even the most techno-savvy of us are harkening back to simpler times. And, let’s face it, paper is still pretty advanced technology in terms of usability and intimacy - although recent nanotech-based e-paper displays are advancing rapidly. Still, it’s pretty remarkable that this particular notebook stands out amongst all the rest - it’s not like the Moleskine has any features that a folded piece of A4 doesn’t have (except for that nifty elastic strap and the pocket in the back).

Thinking about it, the Moleskine is sort of like the iPod. The iPod has a feature set no different from all the other portable music players out there, yet Apple holds, according to recent statistics, a staggering 90% of the market. As with the iPod, the Moleskine’s success in no small part due to some excellent image marketing by their makers, Modo and Modo, who claim - exaggerating slightly - that the Moleskine was used by such luminaries as Indiana Jones’s dad, Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Chatwin and Vincent van Gogh. Like the iPod, the Moleskine is seen as being slick, cool, and geeks being geeks, very hackable.

Silly? Maybe. Natural? Yes.

I think tool fetishism is something that’s fairly easy to develop if you have a creative, geeky mindset. To an extent, we’re hard-wired to treat tools as extensions of our own bodies (somebody’s car bumps into yours, you’re much more likely to say “He hit me!” than “His car hit my car!”, as Scott McCloud points out in Reinventing Comics), so a nice tool does improve your self-image. To me, that can be worth paying a little extra for a notebook. I’m actually drafting this with a 3B pencil in a large, ruled Moleskine, as I do with most of these blog entries. Call me infected, but it does feel nice: the paper is smooth, writing effortless, and it sits nicely on my knee.