# Digital Gardens Let You Cultivate Your Own Little Bit of the Internet

![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article2.74d541386bbf.png)
[[ReadWise]]
## Metadata
- Author: [[Tanya Basu]]
- Full Title: Digital Gardens Let You Cultivate Your Own Little Bit of the Internet
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

## Highlights
- she envisions a page that includes thoughts on her favorite museums, describes the emotions they evoked, and invites others to share their favorite museums and what they’ve learned
- These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm.
- **Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests**
- Through them, **people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.**
- The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.”
- The new wave of digital gardens discuss books and movies, with introspective journal entries; others offer thoughts on philosophy and politics. Some are works of art in themselves, visual masterpieces that invite the viewer to explore; others are simpler and more utilitarian, using Google Docs or Wordpress templates
- Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.
- **gardens don’t follow rules. They’re not blogs**, short for “weblogs,” a term that suggests a time-stamped record of thought. **They’re not a social-media platform**—connections are made, but often it’s through linking to other digital gardens, or gathering in forums like Reddit and Telegram to nerd out over code.
- **With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”**
- they **can be edited at any time to reflect evolution and change**
- **The idea is similar to editing a Wikipedia entry, though digital gardens are not meant to be the ultimate word on a topic.**
- the whole point of **digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist.**
- It’s less about iterative learning and more about public learning
- “The content is not on Twitter, and it’s never deleted,” she says. “Everyone does their own weird thing. The sky’s the limit.”
- Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements
- **By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance**
- What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. **When you learn more, you add to it.** It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective
- an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.”