
The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral - polm23
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
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pharke
From 2015, it's depressing that the sea change he felt didn't materialize.
This is a very good exposition of what Vannevar Bush was actually describing
and how wrongly we've interpreted it. The comparison to junk food for our
current model is apt and oft repeated. I feel it right now, the empty sugar
rush of writing a comment and hoping for a reply or the drama of the up and
down votes when I know I should be linking this article in to a personal
datastore and expanding on the interesting parts and dissecting the clumsy
ones but I don't have one that's easy to use and hard to lose. Let alone a
highly polished one that incorporates the social reinforcement of seeing what
others are building and getting feedback on my own work. I guess I'll just
bookmark it and forget about it.

~~~
kickscondor
It’s funny you say this, because I see this article linked all the time - and
it’s had a major influence in my circles. (Public wiki and Indieweb culture.)

See, for example, the recent ‘Gardens and Streams’ pop-up camp:
[https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-
blogs-...](https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-and-ui-
popup-indie-web-camp-session-2020/GardensAndStreamsWikisBlogsAndUI-
SpeakerView-PopupIndieWebCampSession-2020.mp4) (Which was both preceded by a
year of blog posts about the concepts and which spawned a ton of discussion on
the topic.)

A lot of the buzz around Roam Research also plays into this, with many people
suddenly tossing around the phrases Zettelkasten, commonplace books, mind
palaces, personal knowledge bases and garden wikis. (You can even search HN
for these terms and find regular discussion here about that. See also:
Obsidian from this week.)

If you want me to put together a longer directory of links I can. Or maybe
you’re happy to just bookmark it and forget about it - I get that too.

~~~
pharke
That's great that there is still an underground culture around this concept
but my gripe is that it's been 5 years and we still haven't built anything
usable. I think it's the same gripe the author has but his was that it had
been 70 years and we still weren't there yet. We were on track at one point
but right now we seem to be deeply lost in the weeds with no clear way out.

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082349872349872
The stream is like oral culture, where expressions exist in temporal sequence
and referring to connections often requires indirectly shared context; the
garden is like a literate culture, where expressions can directly as well as
indirectly link?

Both are fun and useful; I tend to gravitate to the literate side
(coincidence: "garden" and "culture" both have agricultural roots) because
direct linking makes it easy to discover new garden paths, whereas the oral
side requires a much deeper commitment to learning a culture to catch the
references streaming past.

~~~
pdinny
While it isn't quite the Federated Wiki that the author describes, I've been
enjoying using are.na to curate my readings and areas of interest.

When I post a link to a channel (as they call it), such as this article, it
shows me other public channels that contain the same link, which I can then
include or explore for related links, or even contribute to.

As an excellent example I've now found many related readings to this article
that aren't directly about the same topic but are close enough to have been
curated into the same set by some users.

