Garden and streams

https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ federated wiki: wiki things that you know instead of blogging/tweeting

• “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. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of building an argument about the issue this attempts to build a model of the issue that can generate new understandings.”
  • everyone has their own meaning
  • building complexity over reducing complexity “I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and 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.”
• Web as garden vs. as a stream
  • “The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.”
    • “The Garden is what I was doing in the wiki as I added the Gun Control articles, building out a network of often conflicting information into a web that can generate insights, iterating it, allowing that to grow into something bigger than a single event, a single narrative, or single meaning.”
  • “The Stream is a newer metaphor with old roots. We can think of the”event stream” of programming, the “lifestream” proposed by researchers in the 1990s. More recently,^^ the term stream has been applied to the never ending parade of twitter, news alerts, and Facebook feeds.^^”
    • “In other words, the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.”
    • “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. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.”
• On As We May Think
  • Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
  • More than that, there’s a substance to the vision that you can’t help but long for reading it. Note that connections here aren’t banter, but the construction of a mental model of a subject area. And that model can be taken by someone else and extended, built on. Humanity can advance, not through argument by through a true collaboration.
  • What’s the purpose of blogs and publishing mediums? questions
• the difference with the stream
  • “But I’ll boil it down to this. 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.”
• elite class curated the available content and published it for the masses to consume in the stream
  • the masses only had the right to consuming content, never producing content
  • the garden is about producing and creating new connections, ideas, and proposals
  • stream is about consuming all the content that is flooded in from above the garden is a lot more friction and a lot more complex, hard to understand quickly stream is no friction, very simple, but can misrepresent complex things by boiling them down too much How do we harness the collaborative and truthful aspects of the garden with the simple, understandable aspects of a stream
• “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.”
  • The “conversational web”. A web obsessed with arguing points. A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought. A web where you weld information and data into your arguments so that it can never be repurposed against you. The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations. “Kate Bowles, who graced us with her presence in both the fedwiki happenings, had a metaphor she liked for the learning environment of what we are calling gardeners here. S==he 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.”== ^ObmIpgJQ1
• another problem with the garden is the information overload
  • how do you know what’s good or not when you have to sort through everything yourself?
  • right decisions ”Github has taught a generation of programmers that copies are good, not bad, and as we noted, it’s copies that are essential to the Garden.” stream and exclusion vs. the garden and integration