[IxDA Discuss] categories, sections, tags

[Christine Boese]

When I heard the original question, I thought of Clay Shirky's piece too.

I know, he made a lot of hasty generalizations, etc. etc. It was an
overstatement. But the ideas have germs that make sense.

My basic take on the original question (tags, categories, semantic models)
is that they all are divided by a distinction without a functional
difference.

Someone else wrote about how mental models make a difference, so systems of
categorization do have meaning. I don't dispute that.

I'm sort of going off my memory of Shirky's piece from a few years ago, so
forgive the fogginess (I suppose I could go back and reread it), but I
remember that I basically agreed with his premise, but found most of his
arguments unpersuasive. But I had my own arguments to support the premise,
so I wasn't particularly concerned.

So I'll either be belaboring the obvious here, or waltzing on a thin limb,
so forgive me either way.

I first became a convert to hypertext theory in the early 1990s. What
appealed to me was the idea of nonlinear thinking, non-hierarchical,
associational thinking. Vannevar Bush's Memex machine. Sometimes its a good
idea to return to those first principles. Science is about categories,
taxonomies, nested structures, hierarchies, but Bush, in 1945, as top
science dude for the US (and top UFO dude too, if you believe the stories)
got his head around the concept of how disrupting those hierarchies can
still serve science, can even serve science better, because it is a more
comprehensive mental model or knowledge structure.

Alvin Toffler, too, liked running with this idea, for corporate structures,
flex firms he wanted to be able to make end runs around hierarchies,
gate-keepers, and guarders of turf-cubbyholes. (see the book Power Shift)

So mental models, schematics, tags, categories, a distinction without a
difference? Yes, in the land of hypertext theory. Does that mean that the
sense of the different models just goes away? No. What it means is that they
all exist simultaneously, like overlays over the same structures, like a
site that has many different methods of navigation: bread crumb trails, site
maps, hot words, etc. through the same content.

Y'all, Google gets this. It's the whole idea behind its gmail labeling
system. Apple's original "publish and subscribe" feature from the 1990s got
this (y'all are used to thinking of these things in terms of "aliases," or
even parent/child etc. in code).

Blogs as content management systems completely epitomize this with their
system of permalinks, paired with hypertext theory. This is what a
relational database is. Content lives in one place, has a permanent marker
in that location, and then it can be punted to any mental model or schematic
or category system, section system, "page" system, ANYTHING, as you see fit.
Creative hypertext pushes on this idea further, by unbinding content from
context, so that ultimately it can be juxtaposed in ANY context where it
seems to fit.

Unbound content. That's the idea behind the entire Internet. That's what TV
consultant Terry Heaton goes around telling TV stations to prepare
themselves for, a brave new world of unbound content. And with
tagging/categories, we build the semantics for the Semantic Web. That would
be how the semantics begin to parse themselves, with this uber-tagging
project. And that's how the aggregate system of Vannevar Bush's
associational links would have done it too.

Like subcultures layered beneath the surface of society, all organizational
systems exist simultaneously in the same spaces. Even the notations or
category systems we haven't thought of or added yet.

Sorry if I'm saying really obvious things. It's just stuff I like to sit and
think about.

Chris

On 10/18/06, Jeff Howard <id at howardesign.com> wrote:
>
> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted
> material.]
>
> Clay Shirky wrote an article a while back that talked about this
> problem.
>
> Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
> http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
>
> "Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince
> you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is
> wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways
> we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are
> actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are
> left over from earlier strategies."
>
> // jeff
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-- 
christine boese
www.serendipit-e.com