Why?
Why what? Why the digital garden in contrast to social media, to to a blog; like the whole world has agreed upon? Or, why write near everything in such a way so that the whole world may view? These two questions are separable, but not separate, so they are answered together in one page.
I choose to share my mind in this form because it is the closest to the medium I exist in. We don’t live in a list, and certainly not in a higherarchy, but rather in a collection of interconnected ideas. When you elect to sort your written thought by list, you quickly become disconnected. How does one talk about a side idea not worthy of another post in conventional systems? By bloating an idea (read: blog post) with non-relevant information. Similarly, when omiting parts of thought (to avoid the bloat discussed), you lose the opportunity to share and elaborate on thought.
Additionally, in systems such as social media that encourage omission, the full story is never told. If (as you often might want to) you wish to recover closed thought, you must note it in a different location; and soon a reoccurring struggle rises from the inherit impossibility of distributing thought perfectly across multiple locations (remember our friend - the higherarchy problem.
For my sake, the majority of what I write is public in a digital garden. In this way I
- Never need to deal with mismatches of public and private data
- never need to consider if I should omit or include, I simply write in another location.
- Show the world a view of me 100% in my control.