The Garden and the Stream- A Technopastoral (essay)
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Extra quotes
extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually
Instead of building an argument about the issue this attempts to build a model of the issue that can generate new understandings
the predominant form of the social web... is an impoverished model for learning and research.... 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.
to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening
the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis
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
Quotes
| quote | location | source |
|---|---|---|
| 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. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence... We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning. |
2| the garden and the stream | source |
| In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream. And of course since I can’t do that for random utterances, I mostly just stay in the streams I know. To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.” If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse. |
2| the garden and the stream | source |
| The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it | 1| a year in the garden | source |
Mentions
Created 2025-03-20 Last Modified 2025-04-03
