Unfortunately, I can never resist the urge to be metatextual.
Because of this, my first foray into the realm of making a digital garden is necessarily a consideration of
- the form of digital gardens themselves,
- where I think their use lies as a medium of writing and communication, and
- how effective I think it is in achieving this purpose
The Authorial Ego
We can start with an issue that I call ‘authorial ego’. It’s a term I use to encapsulate the fact that any act of creating something - especially as an artist - to put in the public eye is necessarily egotistical.
I don’t say this with a negative moral judgement. To me, this authorial ego merely motivates the fact that any specific instance of art, of creation, should be justified in some ways. Art for art’s sake is artificial and self-absorbed: pure narcissism.
In his 1957 speech, Create Dangerously, Camus argues that “art does not, therefore, take on anything more than the purpose of giving another shape to a reality that it is, nevertheless, constrained to conserve.” That is, an art object produced by an artist is a specific depiction of preserved reality: what it puts into the world adds to the collective representation of our time. In an overcrowded arena of voices, we must be mindful of the space and time our creation occupies.
Artists must take responsibility for what they put into the world.
In short, the ‘authorial ego’ presupposes that this specific act of creation I have engaged in has value; it offers something to people; my voice, amongst all others, should matter in this instance.
Where does the authorial ego lead me in the case of digital gardens?
The form of Digital Gardens
Articles on digital gardens have variously described them as:
- free-form, work-in-progress wikis (Maggie Appleton, A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden)
- a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning (Mike Caufield, The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral)
- a looser human endeavour that… embraces the idea of creation, by me, for you (Joel Hooks, My blog is a digital garden, not a blog)
- a second brain that exists outside your natural one (swyx, Digital Garden Terms of Service)
Key ideas seem to be that of curation, public learning, an embrace of imperfection, and constant growth. Digital gardens break away from the conventional format of blogs and online writing, which requires serialisation and chronological movement. With a digital garden, the author can expose their pathways of learning and understanding to readers: the art piece being created is not any singular post or page, but the overall collection and network of thoughts that occurs.
Our question of authorial ego becomes more than just how or why the author has the nerve to share a single creation. It becomes: why does this collection of information I have to offer have value? What, about the way in which I have sought to link these issues, should matter to others? What warrants these connections interesting enough that I believe people should take the time to engage with it?
The Digital Garden’s solution to the Authorial Ego
Digital Gardens seem to solve this problem of the authorial ego by repositioning the author not as the sole speaker, but as a conversant opening their knowledge to discussion. swyx contextualises digital gardens as part of a broader Learn in Public movement. Rather than learning in isolated units, this movement encourages us to learn collaboratively, extending knowledge with the help of those around us. Digital gardens offer exposure to a broader range of knowledge-sources.
For this to actually happen, there’s a necessary element of personal interaction: digital gardeners must be available to engage in open conversation with the public. On most other platforms, this ‘public’ is shadowy and anonymous, and often interacts on bad-faith terms.
For the ideal digital garden exchange, the public must be willing and accountable when they opt-in to this conversation. Although guidelines such as swyx’s Digital Gardens Terms of Service offer constructive methods to engage in this dialogue, it seems that these principles have the best chance of being followed, and the aim the best chance of being achieved (including in other ways), when these exchanges are small-scale.
One reason for this is what Appleton calls “deep contextualisation”. The “hyper-personalisation” of gardens allows for the authors to be known deeply by their audience in terms of their interests, beliefs, thinking frameworks, and potentially histories. For this knowledge exchange to occur through digital gardens, I believe that the authors must also know the audience deeply: the conversation that my digital garden might provoke would only be an online manifestation of the conversations I might otherwise have with my friends in real life.
From this response to the authorial ego problem, it seems that digital gardens must
- have a small-scale network
- facilitate discussion with extensive personal (including intellectual) context
- engage, or create, audiences with a commitment to public learning and growth principles
From empirical observations of other ways in engaging with online creation, it seems unlikely that digital gardens can support significant audience growth while sustaining these kinds of thinking.
Before I started writing this reflection, this fact seemed somewhat fatal to the justification of the form; while writing, it occurred to me that just because the capacity of digital gardens to facilitate this kind of learning might be transient, doesn’t mean that it is futile. The spirit of digital gardens: of learning in communities, of acknowledging the mutable nature of your beliefs and knowledge, of connecting ideas in new ways to share with those around you - is something that I immensely believe in.
Smaller thoughts
- Digital gardens also seem to be part of a broader movement of encouraging more people to gather information, to create on the internet, and to have ownership over a certain corner of the digital space.
- This decentralisation and collaborative potential is something a friend recently raised, and something I’m very interested in exploring.
- Devon Zuegel proposes that certain aspects of Digital Gardens, in particular epistemic statuses, allow people to explore ideas “without having to stake their identity on it”. Digital gardens seem to allow some kind of stepping away from what we present, potentially contradicting the idea in the earlier bullet point of having ‘ownership’ over our own digital space.
- Maybe we can view digital gardens as a way of presenting our identities, and acknowledging that we are fluid, changing creatures - this way, we can preserve both Zuegel’s point and this idea of personal ownership.
- I’m not sure that digital gardens actually get rid of the ‘performative’ element of creating online. In fact, I think there’s the risk that it exposes internal aspects of the act of creation to scrutiny: this is loosely inspired by this CJ the X video on Art Sins , and is definitely a topic I want to write more on.
Summary
How does the digital garden meet the problem of the authorial ego? It is not the individual piece that the author has created which is justified by its value, but this method of engaging with information itself: something about the broader way of thinking and interacting online that digital gardens engages in and promotes is important.
As a writer, I want to be held accountable on my digital garden. I want my thoughts and my curation to have value. Personally, I believe this is best achieved through
- encouraging deeper thought or new areas of consideration for readers. I fear producing something trite or thoughtless.
- engaging in constructive discussion - I want to be a part of conversations around the issues I raise, and I want to do so while knowing and connecting with the people I am in dialogue with.
- resisting an uncritical use of digital spaces. I want to engage in grassroots collaboration, decentralised ownership, and independence from major digital platforms.