The garden and the stream is a metaphor for the two different ways we experience and contribute to the Web.
The Garden: Knowledge as Topology
A garden stands for timelessness and persistence against entropy. It is a living space where meaning emerges through exploration and connection-making.
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Its intellectual roots go back to thinking about non-linear information structures.
Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.
Each flower, tree, and vine is seen in relation to the whole by the gardener so that the visitors can have unique yet coherent experiences as they find their own paths through the garden. We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.
The garden itself has not changed, but one’s understanding, or perspective of things may have as they traverse it. There is no right or wrong way to view it. As a result, the garden is capable of infinite connection and meaning-making.
A good garden provides structure without constraining exploration. It offers multiple entry points, clear but flexible pathways, and the freedom to create new connections between seemingly unrelated elements.
The Stream
The stream is the dominant metaphor for our digital age, manifested in social feeds and news alerts. Streams serialize.
In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
In the Stream, context comes from what happened before and after in the timeline. Understanding any particular post or comment requires reconstructing the conversational thread that led to it. The Stream is inherently personal and immediate—it’s about your feed, your timeline, your experience moving through time.
We currently live in a dominantly shallow web.
“a web of ‘hey this is cool’ one-hop links. A web where where links are used to create a conversational trail (a sort of ‘read this if you want to understand what I am riffing on’ link) instead of associations of ideas… A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought.”
Everybody wants to play in the Stream, but no one wants to build the Garden.
We’ve become so focused on immediate response and social validation that we’ve neglected the slower, more patient work of knowledge cultivation.
You want ethics of networked knowledge? Think about that for a minute — how much time we’ve all spent arguing, promoting our ideas, and how little time we’ve spent contributing to the general Pool of knowledge.
See also Networked thought