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Digital gardening

Dec 1, 2021

I’ve been reading about “digital gardening”, starting from Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.

It is an interesting movement which reminds me the web before blogging. Digital gardens are

  • Inter-connected than chronological
  • More iterative than “fire and forget”
  • More authentic than polished, performative blogging

In my view, blogging vs. digital gardening is unnecessary binary. It may be more like a spectrum. Some blogs are more garden-ish and some of them are more like magazines.

Blogging is constrained. It is a trade-off.

That being said, I do agree that blogging is constrained, compared to what digital medium could possibly do. The constraints are trade-offs. Blogging makes WWW more like magazines, better or worse. It is more familiar, easy to start, maintain and follow others. We are not hypertext natives.