To me, tagging is about emergent behavior and complex systems. Tagging to me, and the folksonomy lexicon around it is about taxonomies born through emergent behavior rather than from top-down segmentation. Complex systems are complex because small level interactions at a micro-level have causal effects on the system as a whole. It is the reason that a CD player is complicated, but a field of wheat, or a bowl of sand is complex.
Tagging I think plays two roles within categorization and delineation of data: both as a means of representing taxonomies with minimal cognitive disruption upon the creation of the lexicon, and as a means of allowing noise to be filtered out when using a tagged schema.
I use tags both for my own benefit (to find information categorized by verb or noun level interest) as well as a means of finding not only content about a certain subject, but also content from individuals who choose to categorize and tag information in the same way that I do.
I think this point is critical: tag based RSS feeds on del.icio.us and Flickr for instance automatically grant a sense of “likeness” between myself and the contributor, because an assumption can be made as to the predicate cognitive steps that went into tagging something as “social_software” (note the underscore) vs. socialsoftware (no underscore). Now, does that underscore indicate anal-retentiveness? Why underscore vs “social-software” for instance? What does the hyphen say?
Tags, and the use of tags as both a means of categorizing data to store and choosing data to read act as a way of codifying predicate conditions in terms of semantics. We don’t need to read the “why” into the semantic choices people make, we can just subscribe to these groups of likeminded lexical creators in order to get our own information.
So why is tagging interesting to me? A few reasons:
1) It allows taxonomy to be based on both human cognitive process and lexical choice
2) It is constructed from language in pure form (not just as a signifier as in traditional taxonomies, but as both signified and signifier)
2a) as it is language, it is subject to the slippages in the post-structuralist sense (words have meaning because other words define them)
2b) as a post-structural system, it is subject to behavior endemic of complex systems
And number 3)
As it is based on language as both a construct for meaning and structure, it has a two dimensional relationship to not only behavior but also lexical choice from the author. Basically, the author effects not only the word, but the word’s construction outside of meaning (the underscore vs. hyphen).
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