building a better garden

It’s important that people—actual individuals—are doing the work for themselves to decide how exactly they want to group information together, because it’s this exercise that hones a person’s unique intuition. It’s personal intuition that gives a piece of information a unique shape to live in

The context opens a spectator’s mind to discover the complexity behind what she is seeing. In the end, the “thing-in-itself” is rarely what is most significant. Rather, it’s the connections and the in-betweens that make it all tangible.

on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.

Deliberately exposing the connections and associations can act as a catalyst for this ‘new kind of power’. And when we look back to answer the question, ‘how does one become who one is?’, we can be liberated from the limitations of isolated representations. Let the in-betweens, associations, and the whole web of complexity and connections do the

Digital gardens are not about creating utopias. Rather, they design towards the small and slow progress of protopias, as defined by futurist Kevin Kelly as “a state that is better today than yesterday.” We need protopias, alternatives, and the seeds of gardens. We need space to dream, and for that dreaming to connect to concrete action.

We all live one-of-a-kind lives with a unique set of experiences, and therefore the way we interact with the world is always somewhat different. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast amount of overlap, and I think it is exactly this dichotomy that makes life so wonderful. When we expose more of the web (the connections, associations, and