As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.
…Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
The contents of the city's images which are referable to physical forms can conveniently be classified into five types of elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.
Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moved.
Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries.
Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent.
Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which they are traveling.
Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store, or mountain.