Why I don’t do atomic notes

I like the idea of atomic, modular notes. It makes sense to keep each idea on its own. But… I think that my memory works more contextually, anchoring ideas to their source*. The idea doesn’t make sense to me without the context of its origin. It reminds me of the way we tend to treat “facts” as isolable “truths” devoid of context (and methodology / source)… like the telegraph commodifying “information” and Google Books transforming complex texts into text snippets. *(Probably some form of digital memex solves this problem through metadata and variable displays, so ideas could be displayed all together with all the other ideas from the same source.) Instead I keep all my notes* from each book in one blog post and then write new, separate blog posts exploring those ideas, linking back to the book post. *(I think these would be “reference notes” in the Zettelkasten method.) This isn’t to say that atomic notes aren’t useful! Just that the same tool doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.…