Writer’s Blog 4: A New Way of Organization
As people, we typically like to be organized, or at least know where everything is. Think about the bookshelf in your living room, the kitchen utensil drawer, or even your towel closet, it’s all organized in a way that you can find what you need or want. We tend to organize or place these things in order and not even think about it, it seems to happen naturally. However, organization extends far beyond the stack of dishes we keep in the cabinet for special occasions. Organization, categories, and classification are a part of everything, even on digital platforms.
There are two main ways that we classify or organize things, through either a taxonomy or folksonomy. Taxonomy, in the simplest sense, is a classification of living and extinct organisms, meaning it is most commonly termed the classification of science. The word taxonomy derives from the Greek word ‘taxis’ which means ‘arrangement’ and ‘nomos’ which means law. Taxonomies work from general to specific ranging from; domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022). It is this specific and detailed classification that makes the organizational system of a taxonomy so intricate and precise. Thus, why it is most commonly used in science and academia. The taxonomy can also be used to create realistic comparisons and benchmarks for the different algorithms we see online. As a whole, it provides insight for users with search strategies, operators, and future uses of the algorithm (Stork, et al., 2020).
In contrast, the second main form of organization is what is called a folksonomy. Folksonomies are one of the most popular Internet trends we see today. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says we currently create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003 (Schmidt, 2010). In short, we are now creating an enormous amount of information that we constantly need to sort through. This is when folksonomies and collaborative tagging come in. Web 2.0 allows users to add, change, share, and improve content across all different platforms. As a result, whenever we add tags or keywords to a post, article, or update, we are helping organize all of the information that is currently on the Internet.
In Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Order by David Weinberger, he describes how this new system of tagging is changing our rules of organization and order. We are no longer bound by physical constraints like the Dewey Decimal system or a library, rather, we are organizing things based on metadata which is basically information about information (Wright, 2014). Thomas Vander Wal, the creator of the term folksonomy, says that they are an extremely useful tool for online personal information management because the tags are coined in the words of the user, not in the words of an electronic algorithm system (Neal, 2008). There is also the benefit of social aspects, as folksonomies allow users to use those tags to find new content and connections online. As a result, the more we tag, the more accurate our searches can be. This means that in order to solve our crisis of information overload, we simply need to include more information in what we post.
Even though tagging information either through a taxonomy or folksonomy can help with our organization of online material, there are constraints with both. One of the biggest problems with the information that is organized in traditional taxonomic systems is the fact that these systems can hide as much information as they share (Wright, 2014). There are also usually limits to tagging, which means that an item we tag could exist in multiple places at once. Traditional taxonomies also give an immense amount of power to the institutions that create them. This is one of the main reasons why the algorithms are so strong and hard to reprogram. They are the knowledge authority and have the ability to say how an item is categorized. The big issue with folksonomies is the fact that these kinds of labels are created by the individual. This means that one person may tag a picture completely different than another person. Due to the fact that tagging in a folksonomy is subjective, there can sometimes be a great inconsistency in opinion and interpretation of what is posted.
Sociologist Erving Goffman understood that labeling has its effects on people (Wright, 2014). In his “Labeling Theory”, Goffman states that when a thing or person is labeled in some specific way by society, no matter if it is true or false, that thing or person begins to take on the characteristic of that label. This does not mean that we should stop tagging and labeling what we post online, but that no matter if something is labeled through a taxonomy or a folksonomy, we should be cautious of the words we use to categorize it. There is great power in labeling.
