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06/09/2005 Archived Entry: "Folksonomy"

Another term (in progress) for the Digital Dictionary.

Folksonomy

Folksonomy is a term which has come to mean an emerging new media system of categorization, one whose focus is not fixed categories (as in the tradition of print culture) but shifting categories determined by a user’s given interests, desires, associations, reference points, or other features at a given moment. In that sense, folksonomy is understood as a social system, social for the meta-level interactions among users it requires. In folksonomy, classification schemes do not come from some place within a hierarchy, but instead are generated through the sense of a folk, albeit a digital one.
The social and the folk have often been at the heart of Web-discussion (the web de-personalizes space/makes us more alienated/fosters community/creates relationships). What is often missing is an understanding of the social space as not a binary division (or it’s social/or it alienates), but rather an investigation into the social space as an alternative kind of space with a different logic altogether.
Whereas the folk owed some identity to the public space: the café, the arena, the school, the auditorium, the square, the digital collective is centered around the empty space. The empty space is marked by the tag – the meta-level indicator of meaning and categorization. But the tag is itself open-ended; its status determined by more than one user at more than one (often overlapping) moment.
We have, and still do, always tagged information. The logic of print, however, with its emphasis on fixed location (topoi) keeps those tags as more or less parts of a stable scheme (differance notwithstanding). Literacy is one such tag. To be literate is to be tagged in a very specific way practically (“I learned to read and write”) and ideologically (this identification will allow me work and financial stability). Even when the critiques are recognizable (Graff’s literacy myth), the tag remains. Literacy is not meant to be an open-ended term. Add “visual,” “techno,” or some other prefix, and it is still, at its core, the same tag.
Folksonomy, at the meta level, reflects a different way to tag information.
The argument, then, regarding space (and the categorical schemes which construct space) in the digital may be viewed as that between ideology: Habermas vs Weinberger/Shirky. But even that division will do little to clarify or allow us to engage with folksonomy as a new media categorization practice. Because within folksonomy is folksono(me). Within every creation of new space (and these creations shift and change), there is always a me. That addition of the me is not ego-centric as much as it is an indicator of the role of the individual, the me, within this approach. The print space really does not rely on the me to exist or refer. The folksono(me) does. Of course, in print, the essay is a place for the me to exist, but the essay is not a categorical scheme built around the me like folksono(me) is: I.e., folksono(me) is not just media, it is meta-media. Within every act of tagging, I (me) am referenced. This digital “I” is a notion not in tune with the so-called identity swapping popularized in early MOO studies or Turkle’s work, but instead it is a moment more akin to Roland Barthes’ comment in Camera Lucida that “I” am the reference of every photograph. Barthes, too, explored meta-media as rhetoric. Following his understanding of the punctum, then, in folksonomy, I am the reference of every reference.