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.
It is true that [the artist], like everybody else, derives remuneration from his work (though not, strictly speaking, profit in the financial sense, of the word, since what he invests in his work is not money but time and skill, whose returns cannot be calculated in percentages). The remuneration is frequently beyond the amount necessary to enable him to go on working. What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls “my own work”, and nine times out of ten, this means the same work (i.e. the exercise of his art) that he does for money. The peculiar charm of his escape is that he is relieved, not from the work but from the money.
What distinguishes him here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work.