A digital garden is a personal space in which one cultivates their knowledge online. It resembles a form that rejects the rigidity of the internet today and embraces imperfection and learning in public. Where traditional forms — especially blogs — prioritise writing at intervals of time, digital gardens encourage regular cultivation; ergo, it means that it needs to be updated regularly in a low-effort manner.
Sources to evaluate
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden; essentially at this point a DG bible
- What Is A Digital Garden? 🌱 Benefits & Philosophy - Obsidian PKM
I feel like digital gardening, in most common implementations, has two avenues in which it’s being done:
- as a personal knowledge base, where the goal is to obtain and retain as much correct information as possible; and
- as a place of introspection, where the goal is to reflect on your knowledge (what you know of it, and what you make of it); to use it as a place of forming opinions and beliefs.
The idea of gardening as the first point is something I’m erring against, because I believe the goal shouldn’t be so much to produce a personal encyclopaedia (Wikipedia and Brittanica exist for that) but to document the relationship you have with knowledge. This is a pretty new realisation, and it’s something I’m sure to consider moving forward when I do continue pruning and tending this garden of mine over time.
To me, a pretty good sign of this happening in “the way that I intended” is:
- Forming more thoughts that can be backed up with a personal pronoun — when “I think”s show up, it’s likely I’m headed in the right direction.
- Introspective and questioning in nature — where the goal isn’t so much to document the knowledge itself, but to break down my inner monologue behind it.
I’m starting to realise now that digital gardening could be a deeply personal and vulnerable thing to do, but the idea that it remains ever malleable seems comforting to me in a way. You tend to your garden as you grow.
On supercharging gardens with AI
I remain ambivalent about this, because it really depends on how AI is being used here. From my own observations, there are two ways people have been supercharging their digital gardens with AIs — particularly LLMs:
- As augmenters: LLMs help to sift through the immense density of a person’s garden to connect different ideas together, organise the contents better, and to make the garden as a whole more cohesive.
- As replacements: LLMs are tasked to rewrite content, replacing and bypassing the person’s thought processes.
Given how I lean greatly into the idea that a garden is a place for a person to evaluate their relationship with thinking and knowledge, the latter usage of it might seem like a betrayal. I’m pretty meh about the first use case as well, because there are both boons (helping to bring a person clarity between different notes and ideas) and banes (doing the hard work for them) to doing so. I’ll have to keep reading, watching, and experimenting on my part to have a more concrete idea!