Cultivation

Digital gardening is a dual metaphor.

At once, it evokes a garden, a place of peace and contemplation without the expectation for perfection, and it evokes gardening, a process involved in the maintenance and cultivation of a garden.

Hence digital gardening implies a process, not just an object or a place or a result. For me, the process comes first and the object grows naturally as a result—or perhaps side-effect. Contrast this with a blog, in which the focus is on the result—the blog post—while the process is a means to this end. (Though we hope that the blog author enjoys the process as well, or it may not be sustainable!)

This is a hobby. A small pleasure. Gardening is something that happens when the urge comes to you, or when weeds need weeding. In digital spaces, to garden often involves maintaining small corners of our digital lives, like our websites, notes and files, photo libraries, pieces of personal software, and social media profiles.

Gardening invokes many verbs: pruning, improving, planting, transplanting, moving, harvesting, expanding, contracting, gathering, cultivating. In software, one may tweak, tinker, design, develop, refactor, implement, maintain.

Digital gardening, then, is the maintenance and cultivation of digital gardens. But I prefer to flip this relationship and define the result in terms of the process that creates it:

Def: A digital garden is the side-effect resulting from the processes of maintenance and cultivation involved in digital gardening.

References

Maggie Appleton - A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden