A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered a keynote on The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral . It later becomes a hefty essay that lays the foundations for our current understanding of the term. If anyone should be considered the original source of digital gardening, it’s Caufield. They are the first to lay out this whole idea in poetic, coherent words.
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it’s not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It’s a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
Caufield’s main argument was that we have become swept away by streams – the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events. The conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and InstaTwitBook is fleeting – they’re only concerned with self-assertive immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments.
This is not inherently bad. Streams have their time and place. Twitter is a force-multiplier for exploratory thoughts and delightful encounters once you fall in with the right crowd and learn to play the game.