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A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation . The overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping millions of people together into decontextualised social spaces is a shit show. Devoid of any established social norms and abstracted from our specific cultural identities, we end up in awkward,... See more
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it’s not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It’s a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
“Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting, but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes”
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Language is always a response to the evolving world around us – we expand it when our current vocabulary fails to capture what we’re observing, or have a particular desire for how we’d like the future to unfold. Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one.
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less... See more
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
No one owns The Official Definition of digital gardening. Numerous people have contributed to the growing conversation and you should read their thoughts as well.
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
The point of a garden is that it’s a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else’s standardised template.
Maggie Appleton 🧠• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number . It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into... See more