digital gardening is a concept popular with indie web people. it’s brought up in the same discussions and by the same people in the same spaces.
Mike Caulfield, a uh, researcher and writer and person who does a bunch of stuff, is considered (by himself and other digital gardeners) the “founder” of the movement. He has worked with Ward Cunningham, who he credits as the “guy who invented the original wiki back in 1995,” on shaping this approach to learning in public by cultivating a personal wiki of sorts. Digital gardening, as a concept, is based in the idea of a personal knowledge-base and wiki for yourself; on public note-taking and being a perpetual work-in-progress to guide your learning and encourage your curiosity.
how it re-shapes your personal approach to learning & how you think
coming soon
ownership and distribution of power
Mike Caulfield inadvertently makes a distinction between Web 1.0 and the “social web,” that is the original incarnation of the internet and what came after the explosion of blogs → social media:
It came down to who had the power to change things. It came down to the right to make copies.
On the web, if you wanted to read something you had to read it on someone else’s server where you couldn’t rewrite it, and you couldn’t annotate it, you couldn’t copy it, and you couldn’t add links to it, you couldn’t curate it.
These are the verbs of gardening, and they didn’t exist on the early web.
But what a server-centric web is really good at is distributed conversation. A bunch of people frustrated with Usenet and mailing lists and BBS culture realized this, and they created something that was half-hypertext, half forum. And it was called blogging and it was beautiful, and it turned out to be the prototypical Stream. And when they added syndication to that model it became amazing.
server-centric approaches like the early forms of the web make me think of the concept and politics around online ownership. as a sysadmin, Caulfield’s words bring to mind questions of infrastructure and the right of control over what you own (in this case, the server). I host online communities and dozens of websites, but all of these, including and especially the communities, are 100% under my terms and control (and this is made explicitly clear). in summary: how open is a web owned by sysadmins like me? because it doesn’t seem to be very open to people not like us. (see approaches to the problem of welcoming “outsiders” and non-technical people to the indieweb.) more importantly, how do we host the infrastructure in a way that is safe when we want to welcome outsiders and give them a space to flourish?
the mention of hypertext brings to mind my (as of writing) current read in hypermedia systems. Caulfield goes on to mention the link culture of modern social media & micro-blogging, how this is a web of “‘hey this is cool’ one-hop links” that form “conversational trails” instead of associations of ideas. this distinction makes me wonder how the wiki approach wasn’t leveraged earlier on (at least in a popular fashion) for personal learning and knowledge-bases, and again i think about the distribution and imbalance of power between us sysadmins and non-technical, casual users of the internet, who deserve to be included in our spaces and discussions, especially as we help shape the web in how we carve out spaces for ourselves and others.
how can we empower people to learn the tools needed to establish their own spaces online? how do we lower the barrier to entry and make things easier; not in a way that “dumbs things down” (a bad faith argument i see often from fellow sysadmins and even developers), but in a way that makes us responsibly share the space and the power we hold by welcoming the less technical people who want a space online (see: proliferation of website creation tools like carrd, strawpage, linktree, etc.) but do not have the means or know-how to start? (related: fujocoded’s efforts to get fandom to do exactly this)
resources & further reading
- The Garden and the Stream, 2015
- digital garden, 2022
- Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet, 2020