MT Thoughts:
I was served this video in YT on 9/13/26. I have been working on “deplatforming” and removing myself from the attention economy as much as possible and was attracted to the idea of consuming to create. Conscious consumption in all forms is one of my core philosophies.
Conscious consumption in all forms is one of my core philosophies.
This vlog had some great references I’ll link below and maybe check out later.
Mia did go on to get into an app she had been sponsored to review, which is what ultimately led to the creation of this, my wiki site. I realizd that I don’t want to get into another platform, even if it is purpose-built to do something I think I want to do. Platform fatigue is part of what is spurring my strategy and I can’t “rent a room in someone else’s house for my brain” as my chatbot so eloquently put it.
My goal here is to make something ongoing, public, interconnected, and searchable. There are a lot of reasons the digital garden concept appeals to me. I told my husband about it and there are all these projects that I start on, and I have notes in docs and email drafts and physical notebooks. I can never sort of rein it in. I rarely get farther than early prototyping of anything before I end up moving on to something else, because I don’t have systems big enough for my ideas anymore.
I don’t have systems big enough for my ideas anymore.
I’m also driven at my core by the work of unification. I seek ideas that encompass ideas. Core truths, overarching frameworks, universal applicability. I am excited to try on a different type of documentation and research practice, media consumption, that adds rather than taking away from my own ability to create and express my ideas.
… media consumption, that adds rather than taking away from my own ability to create and express my ideas.
One final thought. Kids of the digital age won’t really know or remember this, but we used to go to libraries to do research. And smart kids were taught this method of indexing your reasearch on cards you organized and could reference and rearrange, add and remove from, as yo shaped your idea, paper, or project. This feels so much like that to me. I can hold the info, which has become so ephemeral, and actually see what emerges, not just what’s next on my feed.
Key Quotes:
[Waterboarding analogy. Mildly unhinged. Loved it.]… a brilliant piece of media is like an ice cold glass of water with a wedge of a lime on a hot summer’s day. It can challenge you, expand your worldview, or just bring you a moment of joy… However, how can you appreciate or even truly notice the glass of water when weirdo from the CIA is releasing an endless torrent of it down on your face?
[On digital gardens] … simple knowledge that builds complexity over time. So where does the garden come in? Inspired by previous uses of the digital garden metaphor, Corfield posed two ways of experiencing the internet. The garden versus the stream…
The stream is linear, a defined journey or narrative. In the metaphor, you aren’t following the stream, simply standing in it and allowing it to flow around you. And a clarification he makes is that experiencing the stream isn’t necessarily passive. It’s more that all the actions you take while you’re engaging with it all fall under a determined timeline of events that is a standard and expected way for you to engage with that thing.
The garden in comparison is explorative and undefined. In this metaphor, you are a gardener and your garden grows and changes over time. It is tended to at points cut back. You create new paths and witness unexpected interaction.
The example Corfield shares that highlights this difference perfectly is of a tweet back in the good old days when you were still tweeting on Twitter. So, he came across a study that supported his opinions on gun violence. In one instance, he could have shared that on Twitter with a quippy message, got engagement from his like-minded community, eat, drink, be merry. That would be the stream. What he actually did was create an article in his personal Wikipedia about that study, summarizing it and adding a link. From there, he searched his wiki… for other articles mentioning suicide that he could link to or build on. And then he did just that. And in this example, the study that he mentioned actually challenged a few of his previous ideas. So part of this process wasn’t just going in and adding a link. Part of it was going in revising his previous ideas and updating existing entries.
References (from vlog)
articles mentioned:
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