> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes
In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.
I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...
In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.
I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...