The Garden and the Stream - A Technopastoral

tags:: #source/article
author:: hapgood.us
title:: The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral
Source

Summary

The stream is about persuasion and influence and grabbing attention.

The garden is the web as a tool for thought and generating insights.

We think the web works like a garden but it doesn't at all, it works like the stream.

To build our own Digital Garden, we need to:

Thoughts from this:

“de-stream” the article

Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it.

simple knowledge that builds complexity through linking.

And when you get to that point, where you’ve mapped out 1000s of articles of your own knowledge you start to see impacts on your thought that are very hard to describe.

knowledge keeps its fluidity and continues to generate new insights

This experience has radically changed me, to the point I find it hard to communicate with a lot of technologists anymore. It’s like trying to explain literature to someone who has never read a book. You’re asked “So basically a book is just words someone said written down?” And you say no, it’s more than that. But how is it more than that?

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.

The Garden and the Stream

The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.

The bridge is a bridge is a bridge — a defined thing with given boundaries and a stated purpose. But the multi-linear nature of the garden means that there is no one right view of the bridge, no one correct approach. The architect creates the bridge, but it is the visitors to the park who create the bridge’s meaning. A good bridge supports many approaches, many views, many seasons, maybe many uses, and the meaning of that bridge will even evolve for the architect over time.

We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.

In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.

the Stream replaces topology with serialization

Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating.

The Original Garden

As We May Think - If you haven't read it yet, you need to.

If you haven’t read it I also kind of envy you. Reading that article for the first time was one of the great experiences of my life, and I think even today, after the web has made exposure to hypertext common it is still an amazing experience.

But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all. Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.

to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening

Links are made by readers as well as writers. A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them

Enter the Stream

So in 2006 or so Twitter, Facebook and other sites move to a model directly inspired by this personal page + feed reader combination.

And we see that develop into the web as we know it today. A web of “hey this is cool” one-hop links. A web where where links are used to create a conversational trail (a sort of “read this if you want to understand what I am riffing on” link) instead of associations of ideas.

A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought.

Implications

Everything else is either journal articles or blog posts. Replying to someone. Building rapport with their audience. Embedded in specific conversations, specific contexts.

Everybody wants to play in the Stream, but no one wants to build the Garden.

It’s interesting to me that we so assume that online interaction is about conversation via blogging, tweeting, commenting — and ONLY about conversation that we assume this is the way things must be.

She talked about Studio Space, the idea of working next to people while building, of looking at their stuff out of the corner of your eye. Your work reacts and connects to theirs, not in this disposable or reactive way, but in this iterative way.

But what federated wiki is the Dynabook. It’s the crazy stuff you’d see if you had walked into Xerox PARC in 1977. You’ll see some of its solutions in tools in 10 years. Documents that choose proliferation over centralization. Page and paragraph level-forking. Edit and fork trails that travel with the document. Link resolution contexts that build off those trails. Page items as JSON, with serial numbers that can be tracked across a new sort of web. Page names that form semantic networks in interesting name collisions.

But I’m here to tell you if you are a tool builder you need to start thinking how to build this into your own tools. There are ways we can hack this.