What are Digital/Mind Gardens?
Sections
- [[ Mind Garden#Streams, Campfires, and Gardens|Streams, Campfires, and Gardens ]] 1. [[ Mind Garden#Streams|Streams ]] 1. [[ Mind Garden#Campfires|Campfires ]] 1. [[ Mind Garden#Garden|Garden ]]
- [[ Mind Garden#Digital Gardening Links|Digital Gardening Links ]]
This site is my digital garden, a place on the web where I can consolidate some of my thoughts and writings in a way that can be both shareable, integrated with other information I collect (like a wiki), yet still a work-in-progress.
Most importantly for me, digital gardens are a place where I don’t have to feel anxious about my writing because it’s explicitly meant to be messy.
Blog posts these days are generally expected to be proper essays. My [[ AutisticADHD]] brain [[why its hard for me to write essays|struggled enough writing essays in college ]] because of the pressure to make it a finished, complete, perfect piece of writing. I don’t want to do that for “fun.” So, my writing post-college, when I learned how much effort goes into a proper Blog Post™ (essay), has shifted my writing to ephmereal FB & twitter comments, which are unlikely to be read after the ~day they were written. And because of the nature of my FB use (lots of health/neurodiversity groups), that really sucks because some days I spend hours answering questions and writing up info.
So, a digital garden is the perfect solution for me, as I can copy (plant!) those comments over here and tend to them (editing, expanding, adding citations, correcting, etc) over time, rather than re-writing the same basic info over and over again without ever growing the idea/knowledge.
In the words of gardening queen Maggie Appleton:
Streams, Campfires, and Gardens
These are words used to describe experiences with the internet.
Streams
Where I live in Colorado there is a tiny little “river” (a stream, in my midwestern opinion) going through the downtown, with park space runing along the sides. In non-pandemic & non-drought summers the river is often downright crowded with people drifting along in their intertubes. . You can hear snippets of their conversations as they pass by, or you could hold a conversation with anyone if you walked along with them.
Twitter, facebook, and other such social media sites with “feeds” and “timelines” are such streams. You see (hear) snippets of conversation and arguments and belief systems, in real time-ish, as they are said, etc.. but you usually really have to click through and really dig into that person’s page to find more context.
Campfires
Tom Critchlow added (as far as I can tell it was his idea, anyway) “campfires”
For me personally Facebook posts & replies in groups, discord discussions, and twitter discussions I’m a part of act this way for me. They don’t have the longevity he’s talking about, but they can be and occasionally are sometimes referenced later.
Garden
Let’s think of Wikipedia as a garden, with each page a different plant.
Creating a Digital Garden
Digital Gardening Links
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
- How the Blog Broke the Web - Stacking the Bricks
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[The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral Hapgood](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/) - Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens
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[The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream bonkerfield](https://bonkerfield.org/2020/05/swale-garden-stream/) - GitHub - MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners: Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs
- Digital Garden Terms of Service