Clay’s right – i’m a huge skeptic, although i don’t attribute it to the academy at all. My first reaction to hype is and always was critique (unless, of course, i’m doing the hyping). This has resulted in me always ::raising eyebrows:: over everything from the *best* bands to “i just met the best girl in the world” stories.

I’m not actually in disagreement with Clay about classification – i am, after all, in a librarian school. My first indoctrination was “classification is impossible – here are a bazillion techniques that we use to try to get better schemas.” So, when i critique folksonomy, it is not in comparison to formal structures of classification. My critical reaction comes from any and all concerns that folksonomy is the panacea to hundreds of years of librarian woe. I know that formal systems are screwed, but i think that folksonomy has its own set of problems.

While i acknowledge the comparisons that can be made about the problematic similarities between folksonomy and formal classification, i also think that the effort towards ‘accuracy’ is actually clouding a few major differences. The differences are not that surprising, but very important. It comes down to benevolent dictator vs. crowd behavior. Sometimes the benevolent dictator goes way wrong, but also, sometimes crowds are scary.

There’s a problematic feature to crowds – they like to homogenize. Yes, the guy with the mohawk can assert his independence, but folks might trample him. Or he might be left to his own planet. Should he be given more attention than others because he is different? Should a classification schema be concerned with frequency/popularity or the full range? What does it mean to classify things that are rare viewpoints? Who gets to decide? That’s a heavily contested domain in classification.

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

I totally appreciate the just-do model that is often espoused here, but i don’t subscribe to it. I believe that you have to go into the doing with the questions always at hand and always in check. What makes formal classification interesting is not its end result, its “technology” but the huge discourse around it, trying to figure out the implications of any and all decisions. Those questions have been around for years and i think that it’s important that we use those questions, those concerns, not for comparison but as a guideline for our hyping.

In short, i love tagging and folksonomy. But once it is taken serious and people are talking about ‘accuracy’ and being offended, questions that must be asked despite the hype – “folksonomy is better” is not good enough for me.

I love the conversations that have emerged recently on folksonomy/ethnoclassification/tagging/ontology (see del.icio.us tag folksonomy for a good collection of them). Of course, i’m particularly a fan of skeptical posts that raise the social consequences flag (thank you Liz and Rebecca). I wanted to bring up a few things about culture that i feel haven’t been really addressed yet. (My apologies if i’ve missed them.)

First, don’t forget Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent based on how people organize information. There is nothing universal about the terms that we use, the relationship between those terms and the meanings behind them. Many terms are contested, used differently by different populations for different reasons and otherwise inconsistent. (Take a look at Raymond Williams’ Keywords if you want to see how different socio-cultural terms are employed over time in Western culture alone.)

What makes the tagging phenomenon utterly fascinating is that there is a collective action component to it. We love to see how people will come to common consensus on relevant terms. But part of what makes it valuable is that, right now, most of the people tagging things have some form of shared cultural understandings. The “in the know” groups using these services are very homogenous and often have shared values and thus offers valuable related links. This helps explain why Rebecca Blood is concerned about the MLK tags – they signify a lack of shared common ground. In tagging, quality is not just about ‘accuracy’, but about what cultural assumptions dominate. This is also the problem that motivated my earlier post on digital xenophobia.

The translation problem alone offers insight into the problems of collective action tagging (see Benjamin). There are tons of words that cannot be simply translated literally both for linguistic and cultural reasons (such as my colleague’s favorite – ohrwurm from German or any number of metaphors). And there are tons of words with multiple and conflicting meanings. This is why reading a translation of something is never the same – it’s not just a matter of linguistic translation, but cultural translation. That’s almost impossible.

Flipped around, the culture of the people tagging says a lot about how they use language that is quite valuable. We might want to see everything with a particular tag using the sense that we mean.

There is also a perspective problem. Think about the tag ‘me’ on Flickr. This is fantastic when we’re organizing stuff for ourselves, but such a tag is inherently dependent on perspective.

These questions have been raised as ones of ‘accuracy’ but they’re not. They’re about perspective and culture. Accuracy is only meaningful if we share the same cultural assumptions. Ironically, we know that culture matters at some level, if only via our collective choice to discuss FOLKsonomy and ETHNOclassification.

Given that we’re dealing with culture and structure, we must also think through issues of legitimacy and power. How are our collective choices enforcing hegemonic uses of language that may marginalize?

Design questions then emerge. How do we deal with conflicting cultural norms as more people are engaged in the act of tagging? How useful are tags across cultures? Do we only gain value from collective-action tagging amongst groups of shared values? If so, how do we implement that? And what are the social consequences for explicitly delimiting culture online?

[Also posted on M2M]