Tags

Having studied digital information for several weeks now in Knowledge Management, I felt inspired one night to finally start an account with Facebook. My wife, siblings, and friends have been pushing me to do this for quite some time, so I finally bit the bullet.

Photography is a hobby of mine, and so naturally I was interested in uploading some pictures to my new Facebook page. As my list of friends grew, I also made a point of looking at their various photo albums. In several albums, I noticed that their pictures contained “tags”, which are captions added to specific parts of the picture, referencing those components to categorizations of people, places, and events. Many sites use tags in this way, or as part of a cluster of popular search terms. The latter method often displays the tags in a hierarchy of font sizes, with the largest representing those that the search engine perceives to be most relevant or popular.

A Google search led me to an article by David Weinberger entitled Taxonomies and Tags-From Trees to Piles of Leaves in which he references the emergence of tags, and how they allow us to sift through a miscellany of information. While still cautioning that the “traditional taxonomic trees aren't something we can throw away without a thought”, Weinberger writes: “In the physical world, a fruit can hang from only one branch. In the digital world, objects can easily be classified in dozens or even hundreds of different categories.”

While I sometimes find tags to be distracting or even irrelevant, I have, on occasion, been able to use them to continue down a path of similar items; and in so doing, found value in them. I guess this is part of that “third order of order” that Weinberger describes in Everything is Miscellaneous. (pp. 31-32)