In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream. And of course since I can’t do that for random utterances, I mostly just stay in the streams I know. To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.”  If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected

Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.