What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?

I'm somebody who writes a lot—[half a million words and 200 blog posts](https://brennan.day/charts/) in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiousity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of [personal knowledge management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management) systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and sorting the notes we take, along with any other writing we do.

PKMs have existed for many decades (this [paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20070516142458/http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/researcher/speeches/PKM.htm) is from 1999), and digital notetaking apps such as [Evernote](https://evernote.com/) have as well. But if you know what I'm talking about, you probably associate the idea with the application [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/).

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique [values and principles of Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/help/obsidian) (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, "future-proofing," etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.

With applications like Evernote or Todoist, there has always been a more inherent focus on the nebulous concept of productivity: getting things done x10 faster and more efficiently so you have more time to get more things done. There has always been a professional business aesthetic associated where the implicit understanding is to maximize profit with the least amount of effort. Even in more personal modalities, it's about being mindful about throughput and how to increase it.

The aesthetic understanding of applications like Obsidian are different—there is a more, seemingly noble cause of pursuing knowledge and curiosity. To synthesize the endless sources of raw information and transform them into personal important wisdom to share with others.

And please don't get me wrong, I think that's a wonderful goal to pursue, I mean it is clear on [my site](https://brennan.day) that this is exactly what I'm dedicating my life towards.

My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: **Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems?** This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.

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