Folksonomy

Manuela Venezia Odell
Nov 5 · 2 min read

And the misunderstanding of the hashtag #soupset

My close friend is a ceramicist and she makes beautiful pottery. In fact, she made a three-part soup bowl set that fit together so beautifully, creating it’s own design when stacked together. She posted it on Instagram then tagged it with #soupset.

When I explored that hashtag myself, I was surprised to find it riddled with melancholia. Teenagers posted photos of themselves with tears streaming down their face, quotes about loved ones who got away.

An Instagram post under #soupset

And therein lies everything you really need to know about Folksonomy.

Folksonomy is the system of which users can apply “tags” to any sort of content online. It’s a categorization system for online content. It’s hashtags on Instagram, on YouTube, it’s tags on Etsy. It’s the public’s ability to categorize their own content with whatever tags fit. The tags are then easily searchable with all content that added that tag.

#Soupset includes tons of soup bowls and also lots of posts about despair. Soup set and so upset. Because folksonomy across platforms goes pretty unsupervised, confusion can arise either with the misspelling of tags, the misuse of tags, or in this case the double meaning when some words are the same when put together.

Imagine what you’d get with this hashtag…

Despite the long list of blog posts titled “hashtags are dead”, Folksonomy is still one of the most prominent content categorization tools throughout the world wide web. Social media algorithms are becoming smarter and cutting through the noise. In fact, sometimes you don’t even have to click on the hashtag to see the posts you want to see. Instagram will show you what you want to see, even if you didn’t know you wanted to see it.

The purpose of hashtags was to help you find the content you wanted to see, however, Instagram and Etsy and YouTube are all doing that automatically. Is that the end of folksonomy? No, it’s the evolution of folksonomy. The tagging and categorization is still there; it’s just happening behind the scenes.

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