Digital gardens header.

Digital Gardens

Description

I first became aware of the digital garden as a concept while clicking through the website Cloudhiker at work. By chance, I landed on Maggie Appleton's essay "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden," which I think is a fantastic, well-researched introduction to the subject.

The basic idea is that, rather than engaging with social media (walled gardens) and its many pitfalls, you cultivate a personal website or "wiki" that gathers your quickest loosest writing about interesting information you've uncovered, creative ideas, and links to resources you found helpful. Hypertext links your writing together into a "garden" that a user can "stroll through," and like a garden you constantly build upon and "trim" your information collection. It's a way to revist the old ways of using the web and to detox from social media usage in one fell swoop.

For someone who's always struggled with organizing my ideas (and wanting them to be impossibly perfect), there is something liberatory about this concept. It's also inarguably more rewarding and "productive" than scrolling social media sites endlessly, or even engaging with platforms that approach being but aren't quite digital gardens, like Tumblr and Pinterest.

It takes an incredible amount of effort, however, to maintain a digital garden -- just like its traditional, botanical counterpart. For me, this effort is well worth it because I feel like my ability to "think about thinking" and to communicate my thoughts will atrophy otherwise.

Connections

  • While Cloudhiker isn't a digital garden, it contains many examples of digital gardens from creators past and present. It's really worth opening up and clicking around in if you intend to create a personal site of any kind.

Sources