Mike Caulfield makes a distinction between online posts that are “gardens” and posts that are “streams.”
Streams are posts that you read, and then they move on, disappearing into history. They are utterances, meaning that they can only be correctly understood by what was said before. You can follow the chain of utterance back, thanks to the web, but you remain in that same stream of thought.
Most social media and blog posts are streams.
But there are also gardens. These are posts that have rich semantic links to other posts, which gives them a topology, or a sense of “place-i-ness”. Rich links mean you are not locked in to one stream of thought, but you can journey through other thoughts as well.
Links Create Place
According to Caulfield:
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. 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
As an example Caulfield cites a post he wrote that correlated high suicide rates to high levels of gun ownership. He decided that it made sense to link this post to another post he had written, which suggested there were regional aspects to high suicide rates. However, this second post also suggested that race, in particular “whiteness” of the victim, was a strong factor in high suicide rates.
This meant that he was now working with two ideas, high levels of gun ownership and high levels of whiteness. Of course, these ideas were in their original posts, but without the link the ideas wouldn’t have come together. The link made a bridge between the ideas “high levels of gun ownership” and “high levels of whiteness.”
A Place You Can Return To
There is one other aspect to this idea of “links as topology” that Caulfield doesn’t mention. But once you start “gardening” your posts with rich links, you increase the likelihood that you revisit the post. It becomes a “place” that you go back to again and again.
SOURCE: Mike Caulfield The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral
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