On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity

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

A garden is usually a place where things grow.

Gardens can be very personal and full of whimsy or a garden can be a source of food and substance.

We gather and work together in community gardens to share the labor as well as the rewards of a collective effort.

It's a comparison that you can take very far. From "planting seeds" and "pulling weeds" to t... See more

Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

tiny internets is a research inquiry attempting to answer the question:

What does a more natural, soft, and quiet internet look like, one where the public spaces are actively shaped by us to not only use but live in?

And also

How do we facilitate serendipitous intimacy on the internet?

How do we make people aware that they are co-inhabiting a space

... See more

The internet, or “the information superhighway” as we Germans like to call it 🫠 is overwhelming people while making them addicted to it. In the piece below, Kyle Chayka frames curation as a way to slow down that information autobahn. By slowing down, curation offers people time to breathe and fully take in a piece of “content” instead of mindlessl... See more