Early anthropologists belkieved that distance is equivalent to the past. Thus, the further away someone is to the European central, the more likely they are to represent the past. This is embedded in the notion of “otherness.” Of course, we no longer believe that people far from us are that (biologically) different than us, but those early thoughts fundamentally framed some of our thoughts about difference.

For most people, those far away or in a distant past feel so still fundamentally different.

What is interesting about the web is that it starts to collapse time and space. In theory, this should eliminate the notions of “otherness” but somehow, in reality, i think that it will just create confusion. I’d hypothesize that people will continue to judge others along their local notions of similarity and create new barriers to time and space that did not previously exist. Of course, perhaps i’m just being pessimistic today.

When we talk about information categorization, we assume that our coarse categories have no impact on the people who deal with them. People need to adapt to the atrocious indexing that we do, right? If a category is wrong, it’ll be adapted, right?

But the thing is that if you believe Elliot Aronson’s arguments in “Social Animal,” you have to believe that our early categorizations play a significant role in how people relate to the material, as they are more likely to reinterpret current information to fit their early mental models than to adjust their early categories.

What does this mean for coarse categorization that is implied to evolve? How does Yahoo!s listing of categories shape the way we think about web information?