the Stream is inhospitable to strangers

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.

• The Garden and the Stream- A Technopastoral (essay), Mike Caulfield 2| the garden and the stream