The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

The “conversational web”. A web obsessed with arguing points. A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought. A web where you weld information and data into your arguments so that it can never be repurposed against you. The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations. And a web that c... See more

This is true of everything in the garden. Each flower, tree, and vine is seen in relation to the whole by the gardener so that the visitors can have unique yet coherent experiences as they find their own paths through the garden. We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.

In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by. It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments — ex... See more

To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.” If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

We and them is built into the logic of the Stream. In blogging, each person gets to define who they believe is in the conversation they are having. That’s what blogging/twitter/facebook is, by definition.

Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.

Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of ... See more