Mike Caulfield
hapgood.us · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Mike Caulfield, an educator and digital literacy researcher, writes about the web's design, hypertext, fact-checking, and online information.
What HN saysHN commenters often cite his 'Garden and the Stream' essay, which supplies metaphors for kinds of knowledge work and web publishing.
33HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
42stories submitted
495story points
8 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral11 people · 76 points · first shared 2015 · 5 comments on HN
- 2Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents3 people · 111 points · first shared 2015 · 51 comments on HN
- 3Federated Education: New Directions in Digital Collaboration3 people · 31 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 4There’s a simple alternative to the current web2 people · 150 points · first shared 2014 · 143 comments on HN
- 5We Should Put Fact-Checking Tools in the Core Browser2 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Trump University’s Online Materials Are a Lot Better Than Your University’s1 people · 32 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
- 7QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning1 people · 27 points · first shared 2018 · 11 comments on HN
- 8Control-F and Building Resilient Information Networks1 people · 25 points · first shared 2020 · 3 comments on HN
- 9Information Underload1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10Why Facebook Won, and Other Hard Truths1 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 11Berners-Lee Got Knocked Down to a Poster Session (2015)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 12The Adult Education Market is Imploding1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Doug Englebart’s Grocery List1 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 14Narrative Neediness1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15A State Sales Tax on Personal Data1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Ericson2314 · 2020-12-06
I feel like with 2 fields medalists on boards, the culture can finally shift. I'm really excited.
[It's not just about math, see https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastor… for a great explanation of the type of labor that is mathlib is sorely lacking in just about every sector. I'm really hoping that mathematics can lead the way here.]
fortuna86 · 2022-02-17
> "single social media personalities" routinely beat major news media organizations in being correct
Citation?
> and this happens frequently enough that lots of people have noticed
Now we are getting back into "feelings" about what is true or not, or more plainly "this is what I want to hear" vs. "this is was is factually accurate". I am confident individual social media accounts become better confirmation bias machines than even you most slanted news orgs.
> If you can't accept that this happens regularly, then there is indeed no hope for actual exchange
I admit it has happened, like you can pull 1 or 2 examples using 30 years of history, but it's extremely uncommon. And you haven't sourced anything in making your arguments. If the statistics say individual social media accounts (or any specific account) have greater accuracy than news organizations with full-time fact checking, now is the time to provide those numbers.
> The solution is to, when possible, fact check sources yourself.
I think I know where this is going.
> Patterns will soon become apparent.
Yep. You are describing how people go down internet rabbit holes and become conspiracy theorists. "Doing your own research" is incredibly hard, we rely on trusted sources to do this work. What we need to do individually is make sure the sources we trust deserve our trust. No anonymous blogs, no podcasts with a long history of getting important things wrong with no accountability.
Mike Caulfield's SIFT method…
andars · 2015-08-25
I cannot dispute the fact that the web is fantastic in many ways, and I did not intend to do so. Nevertheless, the current incarnation of the web is not the full system envisioned by Nelson and even TimBL.
I chose the excerpt from that full quote poorly. I'll try again, but I'd recommend reading the full linked quote (or watching the original source video).
> The "World Wide Web" program, the original browser/editor, was in fact an editor, and you could make links as easily as you could follow them. And that was fundamental. There are two things which seem to me to be totally bizarre. One of them is the fact that you can't do that [now], that we've lost that. So in fact the thing is not interactive. I don't know if I can think of any hypertext experiments in research where you haven't been able to make links just as easily as following them. Authorship has always been right up there. And now, for some historical quirk, which I could go into, I have gone into, I won't go into, we have a whole bunch of things out there which are "browsers".
The big ideas that TimBL is expressing is still fairly applicable 20 years later.
Other interesting links:
http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/
http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/
http://hapgood.us/2014/08/14/the-web-is-broken-and-we-should-fix-it/
jbranchaud · 2020-07-07
Analogous terminology for Stock and Flow are the Garden and Stream metaphors explored in Mike Caulfield's _The Garden and The Stream: A Technopastoral_. https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastor…
karl-j · 2020-06-04
I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.
I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance?
[1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastor…
azeirah · 2017-07-17
I don't use this, but I think you might find this very interesting because you were talking about starting a blog on organizing information
http://zettelkasten.de/book/de
(click around to whatever you might find interesting, most of the site is in English.)
It's basically exactly that, a blog on organizing information.
Also make sure to check out the garden and the stream
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastor…
andolanra · 2015-02-02
This is the (admittedly somewhat long) transcription of a talk I use to introduce people to the idea: http://hapgood.us/2014/11/06/federated-education-new-directions-in-dig…
The elevator pitch for tech-minded people is that wikis are to SVN as federated wikis are to git. Instead of a shared wiki that people modify, each user has their own wiki which consists of both pages they've made or forked, so information propagates back and forth between users. It's a really compelling idea and I hope they can make it work.
jacobolus · 2015-07-31
Well, there’s “right” in some abstract sense, and then there’s “right” as in most profitable. Building user-centered technologies is hard to make competitive with building corporate-centered technologies, especially once big money and bureaucracies have taken a field over from the dreamers and tinkerers and scientists.
But yeah, Ted was right, as were Vannevar Bush and Doug Englebart before him, or Alan Kay after. Some more recent thingies:
http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html
http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/