Quite a few years back, I kept running service notes of equipment I was working on, half a dozen or so different things would cross my bench each day. Like what the item was, make, model and serial number, initial condition of unit, what worked and what didn’t, work done, and some comment maybe about the condition after the work were done and all tidied up, or what parts were ordered and waiting, or that it was a write off, that sort of thing. The notes were date and timestamped as I went. If I did other jobs (not service ralated) these too would be in the service notes and date and timestamped. It were a running log of my days activities.
These notes were handy for quite a few reasons, an obvious one perhaps being that if an item came back the history of work were there.
The service notes would be open on the computer screen quite a lot.
Anyway, on a couple occasions (that I know of) these notes were found to have alterations courtesy some other person/s. The first time it was apparently for a joke, you know something like a note would have been written ‘…loading mech clunky…’, which lends to ‘(insert name)… is clunky’, that sort of thing. Nothing outside what’d I’d accept as within the range of humour for some, and I did have a chuckle at the time. Though doubtful the person thought that I couldn’t be sure of the many pages of notes that anything might have been altered, and so without checking them and/or comparing them with a backup copy, well, the reliability of the notes were compromized.
One later occasion things progressed some, the computer, which only I used (one i’d resurrected) were already on when I arrived, service notes were open with a large chunk cut from them and a tape player (a new job to look at) were landed on the keyboard. I suppose it may have been a freak accident, the computer didn’t turn off the night before, my service notes that I usually close were left open, and the tape player were landed on the keyboard and accidently cut out a large chunk of my service notes. I never thought that likely, to me it looked like it was meantto look like that had happened or might be possible.
Anyway none of this ever bothered me. What did come of it was something of a, well, social psychology experiment maybe.
For some context it could be said the shop was something like a secondhand shop, with all that might go with that sort of thing.
My question, or interest in other peoples’ thoughts, is to do with informal and formal behaviour controls, situational forces, the things of perceived circumstance that lend to influencing and directing behaviours. Stuff others may not want written down. Extending to ideological influences too.
I’ll put it as follows, a hypothetical, taking the idea back into the early stages of ‘socialization’.
Let’s imagine a child, say in the early years of school, has courtesy mum and dad and own efforts become competent at keeping a diary, is a couple years into school and wants to keep running notes of activities. They are personal notes and thoughts, comprehensive with dates and times, though need not be kept terribly private.
These may take up a bit of the childs’ time, and potentially be considered a distraction from tasks.
What would be the (likely) limitations (if any) that those in charge would place on personal notekeeping, that some of the whatever that perhaps more typically resided in the informal and personal territory were manifest in notes, even story?
A lot of ‘influence’ (character of it) operates in some territory involving ‘sublimation’, so I presume this would be different.
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