You are supposed to write a theoretical memo when a thought strikes you. Unfortunately I had a couple of thoughts while I was in the hot tub which is not conducive to writing theoretical memos. Actually a lot of my thoughts come in the shower or the hot tub – this causes some difficulties.
Anyways I made a few notes and I want to try and explore those thoughts.\
The first note relates to what is a practice and what is a process? I had been thinking of the relative concrete practices of gathering, thinking, and creating as practices. But in considering how those might interact with experiences of information; and what should come first in defining; and if I could organize a chapter in which I define the experience and describe how the “practice” works within each experience it occurred to me that really I am defining process, and in defining the process I am not conceptualizing how the environment, the culture, the site of creating impacts the practice. And that in defining how information is experienced and how the processes work within that experience I might actually be getting closer to the idea of a practice, rather than a process. So the process of creating content within the experiences of information as impacted by the affordances of those experiences is the information practice. This is where I think I need to go.
Thought #2 – The processes are somewhat hierarchical. For example you can gather without using but it is difficult to use without gathering and thinking, and when you break it down even further into properties of gathering – serendipity, focused browsing, and direct searching and consider that you cannot muse without encountering information and this usually means serendipitously or through focused browsing – primarily the former, and you use direct searching for information needs as you plan, and you need to plan before you model or compose an avenue for theoretical understanding as a building block process begins to emerge. Also needs further exploration.
