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A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Caufield's main argument was that we have become swept away by streams – the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events. The conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and InstaTwitBook is fleeting – they're only concerned with self-assertive immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments.
Maggie Appleton • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
If anyone should be considered the original source of digital gardening, it's Caufield.
Maggie Appleton • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather than being dumped into a "most recent" feed.
Maggie Appleton • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites " should be .”
Maggie Appleton • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years. Gardening sits in the middle. I... See more
Maggie Appleton • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
The early web-adopters were caught up in the idea of The Web as a labyrinth-esque community landscape tended by WikiGardeners and WikiGnomes. These creators wanted to enable pick-your-own-path experiences, while also providing enough signposts that people didn’t feel lost in their new, strange medium.
Maggie Appleton 🧭 • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
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
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 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.