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.

Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.

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.

At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. But there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that. It's hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn't going to happen behind a Medium... See more

But streams only surface the Zetigeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time

Many entry points but no prescribed pathways.

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.

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

This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.