‘e/n’ sites are an early internet phenomena still held up by some independent site authors. The term refers to a site that means everything to you and nothing to anyone else, by prioritising your interests alone. A blog with no specific audience.

whilst much of this site is somewhat thematic, in the spirit of e/n sites I write on disparate topics side by side and see where new thoughts fit into my existing web.
some thinkers/writers/creatives/academics/content creators have found ways to cater to a wide range of topics and interests whilst maintaining some level of cohesion/retaining their audience. how have they done this?

digital gardens are never 'finished'

no preview

knowledge graphs in pkm tools as compared to personal relationship networks of indigenous knowledge keepers

knowledge graphs in pkm tools as compared to personal relationship networks of indigenous knowledge keepers - might be work on this, look at M J Hunter Brueggemann

look at my class notes on indigenous data sovereignty

collaborative knowledge

a collaborative whole, scientific inquiry and multi-perspective, the practice of wiki-building and creating knowledge, intersubjectivity

shared views of entity, of process, of goal

extra

practical considerations in collaborative knowledge and wiki building
philosophical implications of collective/emergent consciousnesses
discussion and debate
anti-ai, possibly even recommendation algorithms

Resources

info as a collective, visualised - bluesky firehose https://bsky.app/profile/andy.baio.net/post/3lbcx2rwjuk2z
alternative methods of quick-fact-finding, akin to earlier internet forum style communication/add Reddit to Google searches https://little-details.dreamwidth.org/

object as extension of self

performance, instrument, craft tool, sports equipment
how big does this go? do people ‘embody’ the car they occupy, the ship they helm, etc. ? occupying objects
notes, books, maps, etc as ‘second brain’, external processing and computation
Artists’ explorations of extended body forms, re-find examples ive seen

Resources

https://www.tumblr.com/essektheylyss/759729168913252352?source=share

Mentions

“Marx also felt that Dov was too physically intimate with Sadie. When Dov had been at Sadie’s workstation, his hand kept drifting over to touch her and invade her space. The hand rested on her shoulder, the hand drifted onto her thigh, the hand on her keyboard, the hand on her mouse.” (from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) Interesting in how hands on her tools are seen as similarly intimate to hands on her body - or is this meant to read hand on her hand on her mouse, either way

memex

“Have you tried writing down everything you know about everything?” - xxiivv

adjacent to commonplace books, which are adjacent to journals.

“Consider a future device, a sort of mechanized private library in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

Mentions

Smolicki problematizes the haunting canon of the Memex as fitting new technologies onto its metaphor ‘tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage’ and ‘reproduces[s] the logic of progressivism’ (Smolicki, 2017)
- “According to Wendy Chun (2008), Memex has become a disproportionally “canonized” model not only for an automated memory supplement, but for digital technology, personal archiving, and the internet in general. Consequently, it has long been contaminating currents of media scholarship in relation to digital computing and memory, both in terms of determining the genealogy of historical media discourse, as well as the development of practical inventions. The perpetual invocation of Memex as a material and conceptual foundation for our contemporary personal computers and digital memory practices not only conserves the progressivist reading of the history of media technologies (by projecting media as continuously transforming toward more seamless, immediate, automated, and invisible aids for the general improvement of our everyday lives), but also tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage.” (Smolicki, 2017)

second brains

Either physical or digital catalogues of thoughts and insights by a single person

Like knowledge graphs by one single person
How are connections possible from the strictly one-perspective (eg blogs) to the strictly multi-perspective (eg wikis)
fleeting notes vs carefully constructed prose
atomic notes, thematic links, taxonomy and categorisation
external cognition, philosophical implications

Mentions

memex - “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” - Vannevar Bush, As We May Think
“exocortex” - Hamish MacDonald