Scholarch's Blog

On web browser bookmarks

I'm conducting a literature review for a research project and perused the web bookmarks I had saved, and concluded: I need to figure this aspect of my technology use once and for all.

See, I like learning, and it's no problem for me to save something that I like or want to revisit as a bookmark. But the truth is, I don't make it a point to revisit what I save. To bookmark something is to lie to myself: that I shall get back to the particular piece of content with full attention at a later time. To bookmark something is to comfort myself: that, once saved, it becomes a part of my extended memory. That's not how knowledge works, whether for digital bookmarks or books left untouched on a shelf.

As I've been reflecting on my relationship with the Internet, these realizations are timely. There's so much noise out there; my curiosities can never be satisfied. As I'm in academia, this is particularly concerning, because part of being an effective scholar is to distinguish the signals from the noise.

So, I spent some time tidying up my bookmarks via the 'Manage Bookmarks' tool in my browser. (I use the Extended Support Release of Mozilla Firefox, as part of my Debian setup.)

I now have the following folders to organize my bookmarks:

  1. Main project (which stores links related to my active, biggest project)
  2. Projects (which stores, in sub-folders, links relevant to my other, ongoing projects)
  3. Hobbies (which stores interesting links related to non-work, like literature and technology)
  4. Wiki (which stores all the Wikipedia articles I mean to read)
  5. YouTube (which stores links to songs, documentaries, etc. that I save to watch later)
  6. Academia (which stores anything related to my discipline that could be grist for my mill in future projects, presentations, etc.)
  7. Misc. (which stores everything else)

This arrangement is a starting point, and just as I've had good results in physical decluttering via systematic processes (i.e., KonMari), I aim to delete the contents in these folders faster than I add to them. It's not something my mind can handle all at once—imagine the unnecessary decision fatigue!—but now I have some guardrails for navigating my digital memory lane. What was promising or interesting in the past may no longer be the case now. Certainly, that Misc. folder has a ton of links that were added in the spur of the moment. It's almost like a game to reduce the number of links.

Tangent: when one uses Firefox's bookmark manager, sorting links (say, by name or URL) does not adjust the order in the folders themselves. The solution I found is to:

  1. in the initial folder, sort in the order you intend (e.g., I sorted my Wikipedia articles alphabetically)
  2. create a new folder
  3. select all the links in the original folder and then carry them over to the new folder; the sorted order is retained

I've done a good job tuning out social media. I suppose this exercise in curating my bookmarks more ruthlessly is a way to tune out the other noisy parts of the web. I'm not a Luddite; I know there are useful parts of the web (as it was originally promised, before ads, before AI, etc.). I would just like to get better at discerning what those parts are for my purposes.