I shall start my exploration of the concept of Digital Gardening by sharing the definition of Maggie Appleton:
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.1
Digital gardens move along the spectrum of personal notebooks, wikis and blogs, but they transcend their limitations and get closer to the ideal of the second brain by rejecting the idea that content should be organised linearly or chronologically. Instead they are organised like webs of knowledge, connected with hyperlinks of common themes, ideas and thoughts. Not only does it cultivates the gardener's ability to enter in dialogue with the thoughts they had in the past and to constantly grow and rewrite themselves, it also makes for a fascinating user experience.
A digital garden, as I see it, should capture the compelling feeling of following a rabbit hole, letting one's curiosity take the reins. It should be a terrain for exploration for both the gardener and the user. Maggie writes "You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream." 2 It reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Their non-linear structure allows for a deliberate and individual path to be chosen. They rebel, in a way, against the commercial, advertised, AI-generated internet that is pushed towards us nowadays. Instead, they are an unfiltered, destructured, consciously and humanely built space on the internet, where one can cultivate the seeds of their intellect and imagination.
In the first conversation I had with my boyfriend after discovering digital gardening, I expressed my need to break free from doomscrolling and content that I did not have time to or was unwilling to digest and process. Nowadays, it is so easy to be sucked into a mode of consumption which destroys the individual and aims to replace it was an advertisement machine, a brain-dead puppet for corporations to tramp on. Digital gardening and the process of taking notes and consuming content mindfully breaks from the bad habit of scrolling and offers a space to speak at length and get lost in thoughts.
Indeed, we are all fatigued by fast-paced commercial media, and we forget that the media we consume is what shapes us, not only as artists but also as individuals. Therefore, it is not really about consuming less, but about consuming more mindfully, and taking ownership of the thoughts provoked by the media we consume. We should not only let it change us, we should be critical thinkers who engage in a conversation with the art and the media that goes through us. We should disagree, add onto, reflect, and put in the work to cultivate ourselves mindfully. Anna Howard 3 puts forward the idea that a way to become more creative is to take notes. My main take-away from her video was that her idea of taking notes was akin to creating through thinking original thoughts and writing them down. It is no longer about copy-pasting content from an article or film. It is about digesting, reformulating, conversing with the art. The note taking that she does is less about the actual content of the media and more about her own vision of the world. It is inspired by it of course, but she makes it hers through the act of note taking. It is in my opinion very similar to the process of creation, through which we let ourselves be influenced by the works of others, and "digest them", mash them all down, mix and churn them into something uniquely ours.
At their core, digital gardens rebel against the idea of what a website "should be" or "should look like". They aspire to be less perfect and performative than the usual blog or wiki, which we have been taught should look professional, official, consistent. But I am not a "tiny corporation" 4 . I am not politically correct, I am not objective, I am not fixed in time. I can choose to revolt against this limited view of humanity. Like ourselves, digital gardens are imperfect, unconventional, ground-breakingly unique, and in constant evolution. We are not are not structured by the subjunctive. We simply are, in all of our messiness and imperfection. This is what makes them so beautiful. Digital gardens capture the experience of picking at someone's brain and unveiling patterns and connections.
Finally, they allow themselves to be incomplete and biased. Writing with a partial and situa voice is a difficult exercise for my perfectionist self, but it is a healthy one. The mythical idea of perfection is against our human nature of evolution and change, and it is founded in authoritarian, objectivist and hierarchical views of knowledge. It is the birth of inequality. We all have a voice and a perspective, and we all grow and let ourselves be influenced by others. As such, no writing should have the pretension of holding the complete truth. The digital garden positions itself as a human piece of writing.
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