In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)

Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)

The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.

highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant.

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience.

American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context.

As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.

Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons.

I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the internet encourages you to look outward. A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message.

Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted.

Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, their expression can be as varied as every individual human.

It's just a bit depressing to see how much it's all become a numbers game, whether those numbers are dollars in your pocket or followers on your Instagram. I'm probably saying nothing new to anybody who's been on the blogging scene for some time, but as a newcomer who's just here to write creatively and have fun, it was a stark reminder of how corporate the web has become. Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To "convert" our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we have to say simply isn't enough? Personally, I want nothing to do with it. I'm sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet. I have little else to say other than that I hate how capitalism ruins everything fun it touches. I'll continue to write about things that make me feel passionate, not how to make money or gain followers.

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.

It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites "should be.” It's an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.

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.

Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you're hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar's Number. It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

Joel focused on the process of digital gardening, emphasising the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public. Instead of slapping Fully Formed Opinions up on the web and never changing them.

However, many of these no-code tools still feel like cookie-cutter solutions. Rather than allowing people to design the information architecture and spatial layouts of their gardens, they inevitably force people into pre-made arrangements. This doesn't meant they don't "count,” as "real” gardens, but simply that they limit their gardeners to some extent. You can't design different types of links, novel features, experimental layouts, or custom architecture. They're pre-fab houses instead of raw building materials.

Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others. This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date. Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.

Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden. The isn't how we usually think about writing on the web. Over the last decade, we've moved away from casual live journal entries and formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it's done, it's done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to the printer. This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points of the web. Gardens lean into this – there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.

You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen. It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow. It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you.

Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. Putting anything imperfect and half-written on an "official website” may feel strange. We seem to reserve all our imperfect declarations and poorly-worded announcements for platforms that other people own and control. We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. Blogging evolved in the Premium Mediocre culture of Millenialism as a way to Promote Your Personal Brand™ and market your SEO-optimized Content. Weird, quirky personal blogs of the early 2000's turned into cleanly crafted brands with publishing strategies and media campaigns. Everyone now has a modern minimalist logo and an LLC. Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.

If you give it a bit of forethought, you can build your garden in a way that makes it easy to transfer and adapt. Platforms and technologies will inevitably change. Using old-school, reliable, and widely used web native formats like HTML/CSS is a safe bet. Backing up your notes as flat markdown files won't hurt either.

Creative research is all about collecting the dots. It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see. And we can only hold a tiny number of things in our brains at once. So a space for collecting (and organizing) the dots is a crucial foundation for thinking, creativity and more:

collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.