I’m drawing mainly from Mike Caulfield’s keynote speech for dLRN 2015 here, though there are many other sources for this.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
In other words, the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.
EG To me, the TikTok FYP is the internet as a visual Stream, just as Wikipedia might be our most-used textual Garden. TikTok puts everything on one timeline, and takes away your ability to order your visual experience beyond the indirect levers of likes, comments and saves.
Garden > Stream! I think it’s important to note that the Stream has become the default form in which content is presented: our Twitter timelines, Instagram feeds, email inboxes, etc etc etc, are presented this way. A lot of us younger internet users never knew a time before this, never knew what it was like to wander the internet, instead of scroll through it.
Garden Examples