Digital Garden
ICYMI: This page is part of my digital garden (Click to expand)
This page, and others in the garden, may be unfinished or have typos. The information may also be out of date.
These pages are meant as part of a public living notebook to be edited over time.
For more, visit the page explaining the concept of a digital garden.
Digital Gardens are a metaphor of Gardens but for information online. In the real world Gardens are things which require attention and to be tended for overtime and maintained. Old, dying stuff is removed and new things are added. Some things last for a very long time.
When it comes to information, particularly today, you may feel an overwhelming feeling of there being So Much To See. On a website like Twitter you will never see everything you want to. The feed is like a stream of water, or river1 which you can only really take sips of and then that part of the river goes away forever. It applies to everything with a Feed-like interface: Blog feeds/RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon/Bluesky, and even LinkedIn.
To even really process, consume, or get any value from that enormous amount of information we need to do something to process it. Hence why we curate it in our Digital Gardens. Here we can keep all kinds of little pieces of information in a semi organized way. When we are on sites like Twitter we take in all the information, but in our Garden is where we can organize all the pieces of information into something that we can use and share with others.
Often times this is done with tools like Obsidian. There are tools which help take your Obsidian Vault and turn it into a website. In other cases people maintain repos like “awesome-($THING)” where people collaborate on maintaining lists of all kinds of interesting resources about a certain topic.
In my case I do have a private Obsidian Vault for myself and then maintain the content on this website manually.
Garden vs the Stream Link to heading
I was first inspired to make a Digital Garden by this blog post by Mike Caulfield (hapgood.us) where he describes the differences between “The Garden and The Stream”.
The difference means we need to start thinking of the information we handle in different ways. Specifically, that it exists in different states of consumption. Things we find or learn on social media is mostly passive versus things that went in our wiki or digital gardens as having been fully consumed and understood.
Some Links Link to heading
- Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet (www.technologyreview.com) [MIT Technology Review, Sept 2020]
- My blog is a digital garden, not a blog (joelhooks.com) [Joel Hooks, 2020]
- r/Digital Gardens (www.reddit.com)
- The Garden and the Stream (hapgood.us) [Mike Caulfield, 2015]
In fact, twitter’s API in particular has a “Firehose” feature which allowed developers to “drink from the firehose” and process the torrential amount of information, events, interactions, and etc. happening on Twitter. ↩︎