Folksonomy as Symbol

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger has been giving a lot of thought to folksonomies while working on his upcoming book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  In the following essay, he's written about the symbolism that folksonomies in the digitized age: 

"It's easy to minimize the importance of folksonomies. These bottom-up taxonomies are just another tool in the kit. Besides, they've been around for a while, well before Thomas Vander Wal (his blog) gave them a felicitous name. For example, at eBay a sellers' preference for 'laptop' over 'notebook' has emerged all by itself. In fact, isn't language itself the first folksonomy? Words evolve based on bottom-up usage. So, taxonomies are nothing new.

If that's so, then we're led ever more forcefully to ask: Why the fuss? If folksonomies are old hat, why are we treating them like something fresh and important?

Certainly, in part it's because folksonomies are particularly useful when there are lots of people trying to communicate about a shared set of resources and when there's no central authority that can stipulate the accepted vocabulary and canonical taxonomy. The Web is just such an environment. So, even though there have been folksonomies in the past, the Web has given them a big, whopping, important problem to solve. But, there are lots of innovations for dealing with the Web that have not excited the same degree of enthusiasm. Listmania at Amazon is new and interesting, but not spurring academic conferences. Ebay's trust system is important, but is generally being taken as a useful mechanism, not a change in how we think or how crowds operate. Something about folksonomies has struck a chord, generating interest beyond their benefits as navigational tools. Folksonomies seem to have a symbolic value.

If a folksonomy is a symbol, what is it a symbol of?

First, folksonomies stick it to The Man...

We don't need no stinkin' experts to organize ideas and information! There is, of course, inefficiency built into expert-based taxonomies because they have to choose one way of ordering, and that one way is necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases. As Clay Shirky says, "Metadata is worldview." But beyond the inefficiency, simply having someone else have the authority to say 'It shall be filed thus' is a statement of political authority. Even when the experts do a good job—as they usually do, because they're experts—it is still an implicit statement that someone else's way of thinking is better than yours.

In the face of this, folksonomy says not just that we each have our own way, but that something useful emerges from it. Folksonomies are proof of the power of emergence. Emergence is a fascinating phenomenon because it explains complexity through intrinsic simplicity. For example, termites build complex towers by following rules so simple that they fit in a termite's brain. But there is also a political side to our interest in emergence, beyond its explanatory power. Emergence is hope. It says (or we take it as saying) that left to ourselves, without extrinsic structuring or regulation or governance, we will be magnificent. This is beyond the hope implicit in democracy that says a group will be able to live together if all are given equal power. We won't just live together, but something far beyond the capabilities of any of us will emerge. Simply by being together, cathedrals will emerge.

Folksonomies also embrace excess. Publishing and broadcasting by their nature require us to trim the fat from our world. That's how those systems survive —a paper-based publisher that published every submission would go out of business within weeks. Folksonomies, on the other hand, promise us that we will manage even if we include everything. In fact, folksonomies do better when there are massive numbers of tags; Flickr.com is able to cluster photographs with amazing accuracy simply by analyzing their tags, but only because Flickr has hundreds of millions of tags to analyze.

Folksonomies also give us some hope that we will find the Hegelian way out of the opposition between individualism and collectivism, because folksonomies are most useful when they remain diverse. A folksonomy in which every tag is different isn't a folksonomy. It's just a pile of tags. Nothing emerges from it. But a folksonomy in which there's been complete convergence, so there's only a single tag for any one object has created a 'tyranny of the majority.' A useful folksonomy hits a sweet spot in which there is some convergence around tags, but enough diversity that those who think about matters differently can nevertheless find what they're looking for, and what they've tagged can be found by others. Such a folksonomy operates as a loose, emergent thesaurus that is able to translate among interpretations, much as the elusive babelfish can translate among languages.

Finally, in embracing tagging and folksonomies we're rejecting the essentialism our Western tradition began with. Essentialism says that of all the ways of understanding a thing, one is its real way. This makes intuitive sense to us, because we recognize that using a hammer as a doorstop is an oddball use of a hammer; it remains first and foremost something we use for hammering. But essentialism is expensive to maintain. Its metaphysics are convoluted and difficult to believe. It inhibits thought. It reflects cultural hegemony. It is unenforceable. And it alienates meaning, putting it into the world rather than among us where it belongs. Folksonomy returns meaning to us, but makes it larger than any one of us. We shouldn't need folksonomy to do this; language itself should be proof enough. But essentialism has been such a powerful force that we do need folksonomy to kick it in its teeth one more time.

There is a down side to folksonomies. Essentialism includes not just the essences but also their arrangement, their ordering. Folksonomy makes that, too, ours. In so doing, folksonomizing can remove the poetry of essentialism—the search for the unexpressed meaning of things— replacing it with statistical averaging.

But folksonomy is not, will not, and should not be our only way of ordering the world. And that multiplicity of meaning—shared, emergent and ours—is at the heart of folksonomy's symbolism."