In Defence of Tags

I thought I’d done the virtues of tagging to death, here and here. But there’s still more and it involves ref­er­ences to Aristotle and Plato.

Anyone still reading? David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame) responds to a piece critical of the folk­sonomy, tagging approach to clas­si­fic­a­tion by Elaine Peterson in D-​​Lib magazine. I’ll para­phrase loosely.

Peterson gives several objec­tions to using tags as a way of organ­ising inform­a­tion, as opposed to the sharp dis­tinc­tions and uncross­able bound­aries main­tained by pupils of Aristotle. The strongest cri­ti­cism she levels at folk­so­nomies is that:

Because tags are rela­tiv­ized, personal, idio­syn­cratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their incon­sist­en­cies. Readers of texts on the Internet become indi­vidual inter­preters, despite the document author’s intent.

Weinberger points out that, uhm, yeah — that’s the point. The author’s original intent is not the end of what a par­tic­ular artefact, web page, blog post, pho­to­graph, movie means.

You upload a picture of your car to flickr and tag it ‘car’. I come along and think ‘mmm purple’, and tag it as such. Now when someone else comes along looking for a purple car, they have an easier time of it. Maybe someone else arrives and thinks, ‘that’s not purple, it’s indigo’, and they add that too.

Contradictions, idio­syn­cra­cies… and it’s much easier to find that picture of an indigo car.

Weinberger finishes:

I’ll take one step further toward the meta­phys­ical: Folksonomies are not only fre­quently more useful than top-​​down tax­onomies; they better reflect the bottom-​​up, messy, ambiguous, incon­sistent, social nature of meaning—despite Aristotle and the tra­di­tion his genius spawned.

(found via Euan Semple)

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Possibly related:

• Of Tags and Taxonomy
• No, Not Those Tags
• It’s a Tag World, My Masters