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“Building a Digital Garden.”

  • background reading
  • flow (the Stream) and stock (what stays)
    • balance of open communication (flow) and background content/bigger projects (stock)
  • blogging as “performative thinking”
  • hierarchical structure (ey): all content on a subject in its own folder

“Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens.”

“Technopastoral” by Mike Caulfield?

Streams
“fast twitch information discovery” Twitter etc. Cool connections, but growth is only an undercurrent
Campfires
“slower burn but fade relatively quickly over… years.” Blogs and other spaces where you form connections, think, relate concepts
Gardens
wikis — somewhere you can curate and enjoy not simply for what it is, but for the myriad connections you form every time you walk through and see it from new angles (tech as space??? girl!)

mikecaulfield, “The Garden and the Stream.”

  • federated wikis — social information/info “de-streamed”

    the excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it

  • collecting/connecting information NOT for the sake of an argument (initially) but, more importantly, to develop more nuanced understanding

    • the garden as both a microcosm of the world you met and a mirror of the self
    • emergent behaviors of information? can complex information networks exhibit surprising emergent qualities? … did i just rediscover A.I. and machine learning oops :P

      a “found haiku” called Haiku by a Robot (“710,711,712”), #art

    our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected

    Um I’m a bit suspicious of this bit. I think the web as conversation is a perfectly fine way of doing things, though the current form of conversation predominant on the Web today is pretty superficial sometimes. I think his idea is… what, people intentionally sharing their personal study notes and being better for it? But what good are those personal connections if we cannot converse about them? perhaps i’m misunderstanding.

  • READ http://www.eastgate.com/garden/ (Mark Bernstein 1998)

    The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. (bernstein)

  • did someone say “web as space?”

    It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there … exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative. … Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center. (emphasis mine)

  • resist all u want but Stream-modeled experiences (twitter,fb,most social media) is going to sweep you away. shit’s a temporal rather than spatial experience (relate to native/indigenous conceptions of place vs time)

  • READ: Vannevar Bush “As We May Think” (1945)

  • Memex = commonplace book lowkey. collating copies of annotatable info relevant to your own interests and studies + your own notes? that’s literally a commonplace aid bye

  • losing my mind suddenly realizing these folks are all just chasing commonplace books wheeze

Digital Garden examples