what is a digital garden?
Before the stream emerged, we had something else: hypertext. Early web adopters found it fascinating as it was something entirely new, the web organised not by time, but by connections.[1][2][3]
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. - Mike Caulfield[3]
The garden treats the web as a space that you can freely explore, whereas a stream carries you through a canonical sequence, replacing topology with serialisation.[1][3]
Cailean Finn describes this point in time as the “Chronological Sort Era”. The digital landscape, which was once idiosyncratic has been turned into a flattened, homogenised stream[2]. He argues how the garden acts as a counterbalance. Instead of organising information chronologically, gardens allow us to link ideas contextually, in doing so nurturing a space meant to grow with you, not continuously move past you[2][3].