The Blank Page Revolution - by Steven Johnson

The most surprising insight, I think, revolves around the significance of the fundamental substrate of all modern notebooks until the digital age: paper. Before reading Allen's book, I had mostly thought about paper in terms of Gutenberg and the printing press democratizing knowledge and information by making it much easier to publish and read printed information in the form of books. But somehow I hadn't fully thought through the more intimate revolution that it enabled—a revolution of self-knowledge and private record-keeping, executed not with a printing press but with a pen.