I’m trying to think of why the idea of digital gardening appeals so much to me. Is it the intentionality behind learning new things and making connections? Is it because it is a kind of antithesis to what social media acts as – the stock vs the flow?
Quote
“Gardening is a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public. [It is] explorable, rather than structured as a strictly linear stream of posts… [and] slowly grown over time, rather than creating “finished” work that you never touch again.”
Maggie Appleton, “Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks”
The more that I read up on what digital gardens are, the more I realize how my garden is actually less like one (which is insanely hilarious because I’m currently swinging back and forth on thinking it actually is vs it isn’t, even if it has all the stuff a garden tends to be (bidirectional links, interactive graphs, so on and so forth). Yes, I am actively making connections, and yes, I am going back and refining my notes as needed, but what is the “fruit” being produced? At this moment in time, what ideas are currently being developed here?
A lot of writing online regarding gardens emphasize the use of digital gardens for creativity, thinking “out loud,” and producing… stuff from it. (I saw, in a passing web search result, about using digital gardening and making the fruit into “content creation.” My immediate reaction to that information was not a pleasant one. Lol)
I think my initial analogy of this garden being more like a five-subject notebook on steroids is unironically more apt, at least to me. To answer my own question above, I guess the “fruit” that’s being produced from this garden is literally just knowledge, as opposed to content (eugh). By actively making connections and refining my old notes, I am engaging in active learning in a pretty cool way that I wasn’t able to when I was actually still in school. Better late than never I guess.
At the end of the day, though, I should probably focus less on what this vault is supposed to be, at least in the eyes of others. As the wise say, fuck it we ball. A garden? A five-subject notebook? Fuck it man, I’m just here to learn, and this seems like a pretty cool way of doing so.
External links and sources
Related
- 12.2023
- the garden → Is my garden really a garden? Or is it just a flowery notebook filled with class notes and haphazardly strewn-about musings?