<![CDATA[Taxonomies and Tags:
Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example:
* In the physical world, a fruit can hang from only one branch. In the digital world, objects can easily be classified in dozens or even hundreds of different categories.
* In the real world, multiple people use any one tree. In the digital world, there can be a different tree for each person.
* In the real world, the person who owns the information generally also owns and controls the tree that organizes that information. In the digital world, users can control the organization of information owned by others. (Exception to the rule: Westlaw owns the standard organization of case law even though the case law itself is in the public domain.)
These differences are so substantial that we can think of intellectual order as entering a third age. In the first, we organized the things themselves: We put books on shelves and silverware into drawers. In the second, we physically separated the metadata from the data: We built card catalogs and drew diagrams. In the third, the data and the metadata are digital, untying organization from the strictures of the physical world. In response, we are rapidly inventing new principles and tools of organization. When it comes to innovation on the Internet, metadata is becoming the new content.
An excellent introduction to what must be a great article. I personally believe folksonomies are a mixed blessing that need to be deeply understood and deliberated over rather than welcomed as a simple way to organize data. They carry the potential for as much or more abuse as happens in traditional media, because organized tag-packing tactics can dramatically change the perceived value of any idea. David goes on:
Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, so if it’s crucial to find each and every object that has to do with, say, apples, tagging won’t work. But for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags.
This personal investment in the value of a tag (because of the work that goes into it) encourages emotional attachment to ideas when some dispassion can contribute a great deal to clarity. Now, if we have an active debate over the meaning of folksonomies, I think we can produce a spectacularly valuable system for organizing information, but it is because we tend to laziness generally that I think poorly (or falsely) tagged data (e.g. calling a Social Security crisis “true”) will build up and overwhelm better work that, because it is dispassionate, does not fully contest for its value.
I haven’t given up on consensus at all, but I am calling for wise applications of consensus rather than trusting consensus as naively as, say, we trusted the mass media until someone realized it was a human institution.]]>