# notes --- - [[{2.2a2} linking, annotating, changing, summarizing, copying, and sharing are the verbs of gardening]] - [[the memex is the original digital garden]] # summary --- The majority of the social web is conversation. Nearly everything we publish is meant to make a *point*; it’s advocacy, persuasion, conflict. We present facts that act as “another brick in an argument or narrative or [[{1.2a1} social media requires fragmentation and decontextualization of our identities|persona]] that [we] build over time”. These conversations are what Caufield refers to as the Stream — the constant flow of social media posts, news updates, blogs, mentions, emails, notifications. The Stream is a path of reverse-chronological ordjer posts and interactions that places our [[there is no singular experience of the internet|our sole experience]] at the center, making it difficult to have the [[{1.2a2} context collapse|full context]] of any given exchange. The alternative to the Stream is the Garden — this is the web as topology, with ever-changing paths and limitless expression. The original Garden can be thought of as the theoretical [[the memex is the original digital garden|the memex]] from ‘As We May Think’. The memex is described as a device that acts as an interactive linked library of knowledge; you can pull up an article on on topic, annotate it, link to other articles, create new articles, and so on. In some ways, this *sounds* like the web — or at least, what we think the web is. But it isn’t; the memex helps you *think*, not *publish*, which is currently the primary function of the web (or at least the Stream). Caufield seems to be advocating for a more global Garden than what people traditional talk about with [[digital gardens]] — a federated wiki that people can contribute to, iterate, change, annotate, and learn from over time. A Garden that contributes to the pool of knowledge, not just the conversation. # highlights --- >…imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew. >The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. >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. >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… 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. >We create the garden as a sort of _experience generator_, capable of infinite expression and meaning. >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. > >The stream is what I do on Twitter and blogging platforms. I take a fact and project it out as another brick in an argument or narrative or persona that I build over time, and recapitulate instead of iterate. >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. >You want ethics of networked knowledge? Think about that for a minute — how much time we’ve all spent arguing, promoting our ideas, and how little time we’ve spent contributing to the general pool of knowledge. > >Why? Because we’re infatuated with the stream, infatuated with our own voice, with the argument we’re in, the point we’re trying to make, the people in our circle we’re talking to.