beyond the 'digital garden' metaphor

I very quickly outgrew this metaphor as I found statuses of ‘seed’, ‘sprout’, and so on as not that helpful, actually. As digital gardens are never finished, notes fluctuate in usefulnes and get recombined or superceded, an implied upwards trajectory of notes getting denser and better and more linked is often false. As your knowledge should always be growing it should also be changing, fitting different paradigms, crossing interdisciplinary vagueness and pluriversal forms of knowledge, not only is it never static but it is also never intrinsically better or more complete than before, it is simply a representation of you and your context at any one point in time. Some people who’ve echoed my thoughts have explained it well, below.

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“there’s no reason why you have to stick with the digital garden metaphor, which appears to be approaching the end of its shelf life. While the metaphor of the garden conjures up pastoral images […] I’d prefer it to be like the sprawling, abandoned estate of Heligan in Cornwall - but in its wild, overgrown form, before its rediscovery after a century and transformation into a tourist attraction,” - dokoissho

“Gardens are by their very nature narcissistic: they’re about their owners and their personal tastes and idiosyncrasies rather than the world at large, inward rather than outward looking.” - dokoissho ” You are always wrong

Some people use a popular metaphor to classify its notes: from seed to evergreen tree. My notes have always the same status #ToBeImproved, ergo, that tag are useless. I can’t tell how many times I have delete a perfectly written, densely linked note because it is essentially naive or wrong. Think about an idea as evergreen falls in an epistemic trap: to think about truth as an inherent value of some fact, data or belief. Confusing truth with reality is a western bias with ancient roots, as an anthropologist I cannot accept it, because there are multiple, intriguing ways of knowing. Truth is a product made of a dense network of ideas, people, objects and history, framed inside an epistemic paradigm; changing the paradigm changes the values. It doesn’t matter if your vault is only about western medicine, thinking in a constructivist fashion will release new ways of intelectual creativity. ” - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/a-brutalist-approach-to-knowledge-management-in-obsidian/60553